Where does your story begin? The wooden, four-legged table in the Singaporean flagship store of Diptyque, the French luxury fragrance brand, invites this question. Its circular black top, and overall proportions, speak to Malaya’s marble-topped kopitiam tables. Its legs, and the horizontal ‘H-stretcher’ that connects them near their feet, are more of a mystery. Each typically linear part is not a solid, contiguous piece, but a series of what look like brown-and-black beads, small enough for an average palm to coddle, to feel the wood’s warm softness, to breathe in any lingering, heady, essence of teak. The beads look like they might have been inspired by saga seeds, or cylindrical ceramic cups, or wooden friendship bracelets worn by hipsters enamoured by the Dao. For Malayans, there is something so familiar and elemental about the design, and yet also distant and oblique enough. We’re instinctively drawn to this piece of furniture without recognising its heritage, its homage to the balls that we pop into our mouths every day across the peninsula.
The onde table by Studio Kallang, a four-year-old Singaporean design studio, was one of many spin-offs from its original onde mirror. There are onde dressers, onde shelves and, of course, a multitude of onde mirrors, including a majestic free-standing one at Sentosa’s Tanjong Beach Club. Other playful pieces that tease our sensibilities, that draw us into a dialogue between traditional craft and contemporary chic, include the Mamun side table, especially the version with vintage, green-patterned glass typically seen in South-east Asian shophouses. Studio Kallang is beloved by brands such as Charles & Keith and fashion-conscious collectors as far as New York City, and has been featured at the Milan Design Week.
They are the brainchildren of 30-year-old Faezah Shaharuddin. Shortly after we met, she sent me a collection of family photographs. Many were of Sharifah Maznah, her 67-year-old mum and founder of the adjacent family business, Gamar Furniture (formerly Second Charm). They were a blur of overlapping images, characters, voices, and histories. Which memory comes first? Which depicts a time of abundance, and which of scarcity? Is there a reference image, from which all others assume meaning?
Sharifah holding Faezah’s pram in London, 1999. Mother and daughter are in the driveway next to a car and in front of a red-bricked house. Mum, a PhD student in South East Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, wears the same posture of tender maternal care that she will 18 years later, when she touches the first teak tree she’ll grow in Sulawesi. Her hands are in identical positions: like daughter, like tree. Daughter, with an impish grin and playful twist of the body, is as unafraid of the camera as she will be in 2025. Both seem unaware that life’s seasons are about to shift, that their destinies, intertwined like parent and progeny of every species, are going to be altered by Sharifah’s decision to drop out of school, return to Singapore, and set up a furniture business. Sharifah’s metamorphosis from academic to towkay and planter is about to begin.
Sharifah’s ancestry is mostly Johor Malay, aside from her Yemeni maternal grandfather, part of the wave of Hadhrami migrants to South-east Asia in the 19th-20th centuries. Her parents moved the family to Singapore after it separated from Malaysia in 1965. “It was very tough for Malays in Singapore,” she told me, about the privations of post-independence Singapore. Sharifah was the third of six kids. Her elder sisters attended a Malay-language school, where Sharifah also studied till Primary Three. Her mother then moved nine-year-old Sharifah to Opera Estate Girls School—a “brilliant” move, because it put her in the “so-called mainstream”. That led to a bachelors and masters at NUS, where she met Malaysian Shaharuddin Maaruf in 1985.
They studied under Syed Hussein Alatas, the famed sociologist perhaps best known for Myth of the Lazy Native, and whose mentorship is a badge of pride, particularly for that school of decolonising, Marxist theorists. “We shared adjoining rooms, we shared a lot of common influences, especially books. We were going to secondhand bookstores every weekend.”
The intellectual union under Alatas would lead to marriage, and in 1995, Faezah’s birth. She started reading when she was two-and-a-half, surrounded by the loot of the book hoarders: design, art, “everything, philosophy, literature, whatever.” Shaharuddin was rising academically—becoming head of Malay Studies at NUS in 1997—and his collection of cultural curiosities had expanded to turntables and vinyls. “I grew up with the classics, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, all those guys.” Faezah remembers her dad popping into cash converters and coming home with random instruments like a harmonica, violin, and flute. His guitar collection would eventually grow to some 50, prompting them to rent warehouse space near their home in Sembawang, where they still live. “He’s a professor, but he’s also kind of a hippie.”
In the late 1990s Sharifah moved to London for her PhD with little Faezah in tow. She was soon at loggerheads with her advisor. She switched focus and found herself again, by spending time “hunting” in London’s thrift stores. “That’s where I really fell in love with the business and collectibles.”
Sharifah’s budding interest in antique furniture coincided with the Singaporean public’s disillusionment with it. In the 1990s, Lee Kuan Yew had glorified the unabashed pursuit of wealth. Enter public service for high salaries, “invest” in public housing for high returns. The ruling People’s Action Party had begun its full-throttled drive to turn Singapore into a global city of the “first world”. High immigration and capital inflows gravitated the Singaporean soul from Malaya to Ginza and the Champs Élysées. Traditional demureness was giving way to conspicuous consumption.
XTRA, the premium design store, opened in 1989, and in 1999 secured the dealership of Herman Miller. It was one of several boutiques that brought luxury chairs, tables, lights, and assorted interior knick-knacks to the elite. Servicing the middle of our aspiring global citizenry was IKEA, which in 1995 expanded from a small location in Katong to its mammoth Alexandra store. Eames lounge chairs and ottomans nudged out teak-and-rattan planter’s chairs for those with space; and Swedish flatpacks and Allen keys became de rigueur for those in rapidly shrinking space.
“The art deco, the retro furniture, people were literally dumping it in the second-hand shops,” Sharifah said. “And those who recognise teak, which my husband is very good at, there is the value there. And that’s where we started.” From foragers of books to instruments and finally wood. But what would they do with it? Sharifah looked across the Causeway. She found a restoration specialist in Malacca, and a willing clientele in Kuala Lumpur. Second Charm Sendirian Berhad was born.
Sharifah dabbled in “collectibles” like old Coca-Cola bottles, but both market and balance sheet preferred big-ticket items. In the 2000s, every month a big truck of restored furniture would arrive in KL, many via Malacca. Sharifah would travel separately, taking a bus from Singapore to KL’s Pudu station, and then returning the same evening. It was “quite an event for them,” Sharifah said. “People were waiting for me to bring the goods from Singapore.” Customers would help unload the lorry so they could get first dibs. One Chinese Malaysian tycoon would show up with “a big sack of money” and sweep up items. Some clients were dealers who’d resell in KL’s glitzy malls.
Sharifah, in some ways, was emulating the great Arab merchants of colonial Singapore, leveraging networks and connectivity to serve the region’s people. Sharifah and Shaharuddin’s house in Sembawang, meanwhile, became a temporary hold. Faezah remembers climbing all over “tables on tables and tables” in her everchanging “playground”, a tactile window into her future. Eventually, Sharifah rented a shophouse space in Kampong Glam to store pieces before they began their journey to KL. To find them, she’d rummage through junk shops along Dickson Road in Little India, or ride around Singapore with “Ah Han”, a young Chinese man, in a 10-foot, open-back lorry. At dump sites, amongst the cheap plywood furniture, Sharifah would spot vintage teak and even original designer stuff.
But they had competition from Malaysian lorries. Faezah, who’d follow them on occasion, remembered a “quite intense” face-off with one. “You need to grab, you need to grab quickly, you know?” Sharifah responded, her pitch rising and her pace quickening, as Faezah chuckled. They sounded like teammates reminiscing about winning The Amazing Race. Mother and daughter share an easy smile, an air of approachability, and a disarming way of keeping the conversation going. Both are always impeccably dressed: Sharifah with a seemingly more calibrated, classic style, and Faezah with an effortless, youthful sophistication.
Logistically, Sharifah’s first supply chain linked three of Malaya’s oldest cities, the latest in a centuries-old regional movement of wood. For early South-east Asians, it was less a case of humans moving wood than of wood moving humans. The great Austronesian expansion from Taiwan, circa 3000 BC to 1500 BC, saw our seafaring ancestors fan out across the world, reaching Madagascar to the west and Easter Island to the east. Their majestic, wooden sea creatures would eventually be matched by stationary wooden habitations, from the coastal stilt-houses still clumped together across South-east Asia’s leafy bays to the longhouses that dot our interiors.
The rumah gadang of the Minangkabau people, for instance, with its multiple gables and dramatic upswept ridges that resemble bull horns, dates to as early as the 13th-14th century. Similar woodcraft traditions emerged from Ayutthaya to Ubud. Myths are often our best records. Jepara in Central Java traces its thriving furniture industry to perhaps the 13th century. A monarch of Majapahit (1292–1527), a Javanese Hindu-Buddhist thalassocratic empire, was apparently so stunned by the beauty of a wood carving of his wife, that in a jealous fit he exiled the offending carpenter to Jepara.
The British and Dutch colonial enterprises hastened the exploitation of South-east Asia’s timber resources. Teak, prized in local villages and Europe alike, was yanked and dragged from mountains, often with the help of elephants, and exported to global markets via transshipment points in Hong Kong and Singapore. After independence, newly-formed South-east Asian states took over the management of their respective forests—extraction, including rampant illegal logging, continued. The 1960s-80s was the heyday of Singapore’s timber processing industry, as Malaysian and Indonesian forests were uprooted. Today, Myanmar is the only country with large tracts of teak forests left.
The colonialists also gave us our taste for furniture. Most Malayans in the 1800s, whether in those coastal stilt-houses or inland kampung houses, sat on the floor. In “Tropical Furniture and Bodily Comportment in Colonial Asia”, Japanologist Jordan Sand cites a Malaysian forestry expert who was writing in the 1930s about the ubiquity of rattan in native life: houses, fences, fishtraps, bridges, birdcages, hats, sun blinds, mats, even boats. But cane furniture? Only in town. “Caned chairs were not objects of domestic use in most households in Southeast Asia, where only Chinese and Europeans would traditionally have been chair sitters.”
In “Malaysian furniture”, historian Daniel Maudlin traces the origins of local furniture production to the late 19th century, and the diplomatic demands perceived by royal courts interacting with the British for the first time. “The furniture produced by the royal courts was invariably a hybrid of European form and style combined with local materials, chengal wood, and traditional Malay carving motifs.” Meanwhile, the growing demand for furniture in Malaya’s urban centres was met by Chinese, Indian, and European imports, says Maudlin.
The architecture of traditional Malayan houses, Maudlin writes, is based upon the free circulation of air. “Unlike European dwellings the emphasis is upon a large central space used for various functions throughout the day as opposed to suites of rooms.” Heavy furniture wouldn’t work for a social space that must remain eminently flexible to various configurations of being and relating to each other. Sand may as well have referred to Malayans when he wrote about the Japanese, another traditionally chair-averse society. When they embraced rattan chairs in the early 1900s, he said, they were “thus part of two concurrent social transformations: the introduction of chair sitting into the home and the establishment of nuclear-family households and a daily life built around salaried work and consumption of mass-produced commodities.”
These intellectual undercurrents are evident in Sharifah’s evocative, literary prose about kopitiam tables and chairs. After she started her business in the 2000s, she also embraced the era’s primary discursive and promotional tool: blogging. Here’s a passage from “KOPI, COFFEE? KOPITIAM — AROMAS, SCENTS AND SOUNDS OF THE PAST”:
“Recalling kopitiams of the past, evokes a whole paraphernalia of images, sounds and scents…it was a living community, a meeting place for chatting with good old friends over freshly brewed coffee and cigarettes, freshly toast [sic] kaya breads and half boiled eggs; a place for simple relaxation to sounds that come from an old transistor radio or images from black and white TV perched on wooden shelf, a place to pick up gossips and to talk politics and an escape from nagging wives…The most memorable icon of old kopitiam is of course the round kopitiam tables with white marble tops and the kopitiam chairs…”
Thus began Sharifah’s oh-so-soft sell of her kopitiam furniture and collectibles like red thermos flasks, noodle bowls, and cups and saucers. Readers learned that while the tables were built locally or in China by “the famous Shanghai craftsmen that once controlled the furniture making business in this region”, the kopitiam chairs of 1950s-70s Malaya were, curiously, imported from Poland in parts, reassembled here, and often rebranded locally, for instance with “a cockerel picture” beneath the seat.
Sharifah’s blogposts are like missives to pen pals, beginning with “Dear All” and ending with “Warmest regards, Sharifah”. Inklings of community are littered throughout: “Beautiful bent wood chairs. Sold to Alexia” below one photograph; “Another variation sold to NO BLACK TIE, a popular pub at Bukit Bintang, KL. You must meet the eccentric proprietor, Evelyn, a talented concert pianist turned entrepreneur…” below another.
Second Charm’s early “content marketing”, then, combined the skills of an academic, bookworm, furniture aficionado, community builder, and budding web publisher. The posts have accumulated an astonishing two million-odd views over the years. It’s been difficult to convince Sharifah to spend on social media ads, Faezah said. “She’s like, ‘But I did my blogspot. And it was free.’”
Success pushed Sharifah upstream. She moved in 2009 from Kampong Glam to a warehouse lot in a Kallang flatted factory—adjacent to where Gamar is today—which had a proper loading bay to accommodate large trucks. She’d by then also started importing restored pieces from Jakarta, where she was “shocked at the discovery” of so many retro, midcentury pieces, some even from the Dutch colonial period. Her wood network was broadening across the larger Malay world.
But it wasn’t enough. Readers would be entranced digitally but then disappointed physically at Kallang: SOLD. “With vintage, you sell one chair, like, that’s the one chair you have, right?” Faezah said. “And then you have to go source it again. But when you manufacture, I guess it’s more scalable as a business, right?” So Sharifah started manufacturing in Jakarta through suppliers. Initially she reproduced pieces by using recycled teak, for instance from old furniture or boats. “I personally liked the idea then, because, in a way, it’s part of sustainability, you recycle old teak, you preserve the wood.” The material that moved South-east Asians across our glorious, maritime world would, through Sharifah and others, find its way into our homes.
But it wasn’t enough. Customers from Singapore’s vibrant F&B scene had started inquiring about buying 10 or 20 pieces of an item. Eventually, Second Charm’s furniture would become ubiquitous across traditional, contemporary, and hipster joints in town. (It was a restaurateur who first pointed me Sharifah’s way in 2017.) There’s a good chance that you, dear reader, have felt the warm embrace of Sharifah’s recycled teak. But there’s only so much of it in salvageable condition.
So Sharifah started manufacturing in her own factory in 2011, in a town near Semarang in Central Java. Finally, she could increase production while exercising greater quality control. She augmented her recycled supply with (legal) plantation teak from around Java and later Sulawesi, and so she had to oversee new processes like sawmilling and wood treatment. She established connections with local partners who could produce the flourishes that adorn their work, like rattan and steel. Soon, she was exporting as far as Europe.
Today the business has two factories, with 40 workers. “They have become like our family. They invite us to their home, we have meals together. They invite you for their children’s wedding. They give you fruits from their orchard, the rambutans and the durian and the avocados.” From the moment I first met Sharifah seven years ago to buy some furniture, I knew about this extended family—the ones who’d be making my piece and who’d be supported by my money.
This kinship extends from the point of production to the last mile. The ‘delivery guys’ who drop off pieces big and small around Singapore for a flat S$50 are not random contractors but part of a broader friends and family network. They walked into my Pasir Ris flat, panting and perspiring, and discussed placement with me. One had a shock of yellow hair: “a different colour every week,” Faezah later joked. Another pointed at an old, sun-baked, and water-stained stool, and suggested I send it to Yunos, the Moroccan repair-and-restore specialist whose workshop is a few floors below Gamar’s showroom.
And so, while Alatas, Shaharuddin and the other Marxist theorists of her generation were pushing public consciousness forward, Sharifah was empathically renewing the system from the inside, one sodden plank and doughty woodworker at a time.
Faezah says they were “inseparable” throughout, from Singapore and London to the factory in Central Java, which she visited for the first time as a teenager. Put another way, Faezah the intern was job-shadowing Sharifah the towkay from the age of five. These practical lessons seem as important, if not more, than her formal ones: Sembawang Primary, Crescent Girls Secondary, and Jurong Junior College. Shaharuddin wanted her to then study law, but a brief internship was unfulfilling. She was drawn to design.
Having not enjoyed local school, Faezah knew she wanted to go abroad. She worked hard in JC to get the grades she needed for the University of Washington in Seattle. She chose it because it had a liberal arts programme, a great design school and, as a public university, was cheaper than private ones. Sharifah cried at Changi Airport in 2015 when her young padawan departed.
In a campus of some 20,000 undergraduates, the design school admitted about 120 sophomores each year into three fields: visual communication, UI/UX and industrial design. Faezah fended off fierce competition and made it into visual communication—she was more interested in branding, advertising, and marketing, “versus industrial design, which I learned on the job with my mum.”
It was not Faezah who told me about the selectiveness of this programme, but Ian Snyder, the Washington native whom she met in French class and later married. (He majored in International Studies.) Just as Faezah helped lower the guard of self-effacing Sharifah in our three-way conversation—nudging us closer to “the truth” of their story—so Ian did the same with her. After they started dating, the political science buff proved a natural conversationalist for Shaharuddin; and learned about the family business from Faezah and Sharifah, eventually assuming his current role as Studio Kallang’s project manager.
During college, Faezah knew she wanted to make stuff but wasn’t sure what: clothes, cars, furniture, 3D animation, music production. She returned every summer and helped out with the business. There was some expectation that she’d eventually formally join it. “It’s my mum’s whole life, right?” It was around this time that Sharifah’s first planted teak trees in Sulawesi were maturing, her last step up the furniture supply chain. Faezah returned in 2019 after graduation—to find their relationship entering a new phase.
As the young padawan grew up, tensions with her mentor emerged. “She wants to do one thing her way…no, I want to do it this way.” One example is bookkeeping. Sharifah used to rely on a massive ledger filled with customer names, telephone numbers, and random sketches, which functioned seamlessly alongside her prodigious memory. Customers marvelled at her ability to instantly recollect forgotten items and arcane specifications.
It’s unsurprising that younger people, so accustomed to the cloud, would find her methods quaint, and hopelessly inefficient. But Faezah’s drive to digitalise wasn’t easy. “They have a very similar personality but they want to go in different directions,” Ian said. “So at the time it didn’t always lead to very productive conversations.” After what Faezah called “a bit of a tough period”, she decided to “let my mum have her space and do her thing”.
But the pandemic more broadly was a time of rebirth. Business picked up, as homebound Singaporeans ordered furniture for an uncertain remote working future. Second Charm morphed into Gamar—Sharifah’s mum’s name—with a new website and e-commerce system. Perhaps most importantly, Faezah, still only in her mid-20s, discovered her creative chops. She designed a stool in 2021, her first ever piece. “People actually like it! Maybe I should start designing actual pieces.”
Its success presented Faezah with a challenge that she (and countless other artists) wrestles with every day: how to balance one’s inner artistic voice and vision with external market demands. “Part of why I got sick of it was because it did well.” Faezah wasn’t a fan of the stool’s “sad beige” aesthetic; the coloured ones she preferred didn’t sell well. Nevertheless, it was validation that she “could also hack it on my own.”
The stool was “the seed” for Studio Kallang. Sharifah laughed about “suddenly” finding out about her daughter’s business well after it was founded. “But it’s good, the independence, she knows what she wants.” Sharifah praised the “synergy” between the two: Studio Kallang’s design nous and Gamar’s retail and commercial manufacturing capabilities.
Like Sharifah, Faezah has nurtured a devoted online community. Gamar and Studio Kallang have combined Instagram followings of over 100,000. The latter’s account also functions as an artist’s digital sketchpad. Wherever Faezah goes, she documents sensorial frissons, such as a leopard-print cushion on kopitiam chairs; a bowl of ice kacang, its multicoloured globules and shavings supporting a scoop of white ice-cream; and her mom’s vintage fabric fans. She releases graphic prototypes into cyberspace for contemplation, and feedback. If Blogspot allowed Sharifah to speak to her tribe and respond to their wishes, Instagram has supercharged the experience for Faezah. Likes, shares, and comments are the currency of communal exchange, as the hive mind weighs in on the earliest stages of an artistic process.
Faezah’s creative foundation, or at least an important pillar of it, betrays the accretion of fatherly philosophies. “He [Shaharuddin] was always telling me, ‘Knowledge can’t be compartmentalised.’ So you can take your interest in music and apply it to [any] art. You can take your love of literature and translate it into some other art form. He exposed me to that mindset.” This conceptual transcendence, as Faezah and Ian termed it, is clearly evident in her onde line.
“I’m always looking for universality, things you can connect to from all angles,” Faezah said. Happily for the artist, there’s now a more electrifying resonance between her self-expression and what the customer wants. “The kind of furniture fashion folks will approve,” said Female Singapore in a profile. It was a reminder of a little girl’s meanderings in late-90s London. “I always loved fashion, it’s my first love, my first few sketches that my mom kept are just gowns, like princess gowns and stuff.” Mother and daughter, we know now, were then about to embark on complementary journeys: one to the very source of wood, to the beings and land that existed before time; the other to the depths of our creative minds, to that timeless place that informs how humans fashion wood.
After that brief interruption in 2019-20, then, the mother-to-daughter leadership transition occurred slowly over the course of the pandemic. What finally hastened it was Sharifah’s heart attack in January 2024. “Was it because of business stress?” I asked. Sharifah denied it, as Faezah and Ian rolled their eyes. “You were sleeping at 2am every day,” Faezah teased. The Covid-19 boom saw shipments rising from one forty-foot container a month to one a week. (It’s now one every fortnight.) Sharifah delayed the bypass operation by a year—which she now regrets—and continued working. Her eyesight started declining around the time, and eventually she had to let go. When we met earlier this year, she was recovering from her recent surgery. She still serves in an advisory role, though it seems clear her duties will dwindle with each passing month. “The young people make a good team. My old style, I think, it’s not so good now. I had a good run and I’m able to share.”
“We’re building off of it, I guess,” Faezah interjected.
“I suppose that’s how it should be,” Sharifah responded. “You build based on the previous things.”
That the matriarch’s mortality is now intricately woven into the organisation’s creation myth reminded me of how fleeting our existence is. Trees can live for millennia; and wooden furniture can last many human lifetimes. Several times during our conversation, Sharifah repeated “it’s been a good run”, speaking more to herself, a sort of valedictory mantra to liberate her spirit from the house that she built, from the life she once knew.
As I walked around Gamar’s showroom, I noticed consoles in midcentury modern and Scandinavian styles, some with rattan features. When teak meets rattan, worlds collide: hardwood and fibre, jointed and woven, strength and softness, atas and bawah. I brushed my hands over various rattan weaves, and thought of the indigenous Taiwanese “savages”—our South-east Asian cousins—photographed a century ago by Japanese colonisers, their entire livelihoods, from hut to fishing traps, spun from the wild palms that surrounded them.
I found an onde piece by Studio Kallang in a far corner. I crouched down and cupped one teak sphere in each palm, and thought of forests decimated around Sulawesi and others renewed. And I also thought of brown gula melaka, white coconut flakes, and green gelatinous balls squishing around my mouth, as I wondered: where does your story begin?
Author’s update: We haven’t changed any details in the above piece, which first appeared in our print magazine issue No. 3 almost a year ago. Since then, Faezah has been in the news, including this recent CNA profile. She’s showing new work at next week’s Paris Design Week, while some of her pieces are part of Bauhaus Ballet, Szilveszter Mako’s exhibition for New York fashion week, on now. Sharifah, meanwhile, is looking quite sprightly in recent photos, and is—surprise, surprise—wondering what her next business venture should be. You’ll probably hear about it soon enough.
Sudhir is Jom’s editor-in-chief.
Additional research by Liyana Batrisyia. Sudhir is also grateful to Jaya Khidir, Abhishek Mehrotra, Ian Snyder, and Corrie Tan.
Letters in response to this piece can be sent to sudhir@jom.media. All will be considered for publication on our “Letters to the editor” page.
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