About Wheelock Place — and about this site

The building

Wheelock Place is a shopping mall of seven retail levels sitting beneath a 21-storey office tower, at 501 Orchard Road in Singapore. It stands on the north-western corner of the junction where Orchard Road meets Scotts Road and Paterson Road — the busiest crossroads on Singapore’s main shopping street, and the point at which the retail belt begins to give way to the greener stretch running west towards Tanglin and the Botanic Gardens.

The architect was Kisho Kurokawa, a founding figure of Japanese Metabolism, and the building was completed in 1994. Kurokawa capped the entrance with a tall conical glass structure that pulls daylight into the central atrium. It has become the building’s identity: people give directions to Wheelock Place by describing the cone rather than by naming the mall.

Lane Crawford Place, 1994–1996

The mall did not open under its present name. It was built as Lane Crawford Place, to house a Singapore branch of the Hong Kong luxury department store Lane Crawford across five floors. The store installed Singapore’s first curved escalators, echoing the world’s first public curved escalators that Lane Crawford had put into its Times Square store in Hong Kong the year before. It was a considerable statement of intent.

It did not last. Lane Crawford closed the Singapore store in 1996, barely two years after opening, and the building was renamed after its owner, Wheelock Properties (Singapore), a division of the Hong Kong group Wheelock and Co. The ownership entity is now called Wharf Estates Singapore. The retail podium was reconfigured from a single department store into the multi-tenant mall it is today.

The Borders years, and after

For a generation of Singaporeans, Wheelock Place meant Borders. The American chain opened its Singapore flagship in the building and, for well over a decade, it functioned as a public living room: somewhere to meet, browse, sit on the floor with a book and lose an afternoon. When Borders collapsed globally and the Wheelock Place store closed in 2011, it left a hole that regulars still talk about.

Marks & Spencer took over as the mall’s principal anchor, occupying Level 1 with clothing, homeware and a food hall that serves as a local grocer for the surrounding neighbourhoods. In 2021 a bookshop returned when Zall Bookstore opened a large Chinese-language store with an in-store cafe, deliberately reviving the linger-and-read culture the building had been known for.

What the mall is now

Today Wheelock Place occupies a specific niche on Orchard Road. It is small — around ninety tenants against several hundred in the giants nearby — and it has leaned into that. Its strengths are menswear tailoring, independent homegrown labels, calm sit-down dining, and an unusually deep cluster of aesthetic clinics, dental practices and medical suites on the upper floors. Its basements form part of the underground pedestrian network that links Orchard MRT with ION Orchard and Shaw House, which means a great many people pass through it without ever intending to shop there.