Mucho loving these loft hotel rooms!

Sometimes I think my irrational love of staircases is why I love lofts. This is Studio M Lofts in Singapore, a hotel at Clarke Quay, just perfect for my friends who visit Singapore often. Clarke Quay is centrally located between Orchard Road and Raffles Place, with a beautiful riverside of cafes and pubs. The hotel is newly renovated with peaceful meeting places, a good gym and a glass swimming pool. At $208SGD a night for a premium loft, I thought they were a good deal in the land of rapidly rising hotel rates! (Yes, the Fullerton Bay Hotel is beyond gorgeous but seriously, $550 a night?)

Oh, Anthropologie

You are so clever at enticing me into little kitchen loves.

Into the belly of the beast...

Please don't read on if you do not want to hear a long and ungracious rant- I am so frustrated by the shortage of style options in Singapore. Many moons ago, I found a beautiful, bevelled 20x10cm white porcelain tile at Jausa City Ceramics. This is known in other countries as a subway or metro tile, so called because of where they are most commonly found. Of course, I should have simply kept quiet about, rather than, I suppose, writing about it in a blog post. When I went back to purchase more of that tile for the new kitchen, I was horrified to find that it was completely sold out. This despite being really well-received and ordered (but understandable in the sense that the affiliated factory manufactured from shipment around the world).

What were my options now? Well, not many at all. Not only had Jausa City Ceramics been the only place in Singapore that stocked that tile, (this I knew because of an ardous and painfully long search for them), their stocks of the plain (non-bevelled) Lekka tile in the same 20x10cm size, had completed been depleted and they were no longer manufacturing them in their factory in Sri Lanka. In fact, all their plain, flat tiles were in completely deficit, there were no more 30x10cm tiles either. There were 40x10 cm tiles, both glossy and matt porcelain, which were too wide and long to really create a running brick-like effect and they had a mere 120 sq feet of 13x8cm tiles, which were somewhat small. I reserved 120 sq feet of each tile.

The only consolation was the lovely girl who worked there Catherine, who put up with my dogged determination to find these tiles and repeat visits. She is from Harbin, China and she told me that she too, loves bevelled white subway tiles. Unfortunately she was unable to help me much, despite offering kindly to search out alternative suppliers to see if anyone had suitable 20x10cm or 30x10cm tiles. At least, unlike other people I encountered, she didn't try to tell me that the choice of tile was outdated since the 1960s or equally nice-looking in black. Or give me some tautalogical truth, like Singapore nowadays, only like large tile and homogenous Italian tile- yes, I am already abundantly aware that it is easier to find a neon yellow tile with octopus on it then a white bevelled subway tile, in this country.


Undeterred, I took a jog around Balestier last night, hoping to visit the other showrooms, which I've in truth, already seen before, but on the off chance that I had overlooked a white rectangular tile that they might have and which might suit. Along the way, I ran past a regular bathroom-interior design firm that looked really local and chancing my luck, I went in with my story of the tile search. The unkempt contractor-uncle looked at my pictures and said in perfect Singlish "Aiyah, this tile, don't need to search in Singapore, whole street here donch have, only Soon Bee Huat in Toh Guan have". What about Jausa City, I enquired? "Jausa City, they hept very limited production only. Tell you truth, they are new, they don't dare keep inventory".

Thanking him profusely, I drove halfway across the island to Jurong and Soon Bee Huat truly is the most massive tile warehouse I have ever seen. Things were looking up but not for long. I encountered the two most unhelpful salespeople I've met in awhile. The first was a Filipina whom I suspect was meant to be cleaning up the back, rather than serving up the front, she promptly told me they did not keep any such stock. Frustrated, I searched around and found 40x10cm tiles and 30x10cm tiles but in true fashion, the 30x10cm only came in matt but in cream-yellow as opposed to white.

The only value-add that this trip out brought, is that they offered to cut up the tiles, to the required size at $1 a slice (yes, per cut, not length of cut). Starting to get rather desperate, I searched out a 20x60cm tile which would have been perfect except that it did not have rectified sides. This means that the sides of the tile are slightly curved, rather than being flat and cut at 90 degrees. Non-rectified sides and porcelain glossy surfaces do not allow for the tile to be cut with a straight-edged surface, which makes your tiling uneven and ugly. Most Italian tiles are rectified and most Chinese tiles are not. After many searches, I found a 30x30cm white Chinese matt tile, that could be sliced into three 30x10cm tiles. There were 8000 sq feet of this tile in stock. At $2.60 a sq foot, 150 sq feet of this tile, sliced twice per tile, would cost $690 SGD. It was impossible to find anything that could be directly sliced into a 20x10cm tile. This seemed rather ridiculous.

I was then passed on to a salesperson named Raj. Now, I have never met a slow Indian man, most if not all are extremely sharp and quick on the uptake, particularly with numbers and most with language. Only in India have I met anyone who even approached being, a somewhat slow Indian person. But today was clearly the day that I would be breaking that lucky streak. While on my way out, I noticed a beautiful 30x 60cm staturio marble-like tile, with a lovely white-grey grain and bevelled on the vertical edges, which I thought might be a nice alternative to the traditional white subway tile. Since this tile was only bevelled on the two long edges, it could only ever be cut length-wise into 6 30x10cm pieces, as opposed to horizontally into 9 10x20cm tiles. You would think that this would be a fairly simple idea but it didn't seem to be. Also, this tile was severely in short supply, with some of the remaining 100 sq ft of stock being reserved for an existing job. I told Raj that the issue was the predictability of the production and supply, even if it was in 2 months time, as opposed to the immediate inventory quantity and asked him to call me with some answers. This tile, priced similarly on a sq foot basis but requiring $5 to procure 2sq feet, would cost $510 for 100 sq feet, or $765 for 150 sq feet.


These encounters drove me online in my search for the subway tiles. Other than in Singapore and perhaps Asia, it is the simplest thing in the world to locate subway tiles. In the UK, Tons of Tiles sold this tile for 10.90 pounds per sq m, which isn't bad at all but the shipping, just to the port of Singapore, without clearence, for which you have to get your own broker, costs 400 pounds! LeadCutter Designs has the tiles for 17.05 pounds per sq m and Tile Supply.co for 22.74 pounds per sq m. In the US, Anchor Bay Tiles and BuyTiles.com all have the tile but they don't ship internationally. Mosiac Tile supplies has the tile for US$1.77 each but I have no idea if they ship. Australia's leading tiles stores are apparently Johnston Tiles, Beaumont Tiles and Amber Tiles, all of whom I've emailed and are waiting on for a reply. I've even tried Alibaba.com, despite their high minimum volume orders. Feedback appreciated, I'd love to hear your opinion on what you think is the best option!