เบ๊เจ็กลักฮึ้ง

This row on Maitri Chit Road, next to The Mustang Blu hotel, reads as five original shophouse units, anchored by a chamfered corner shopfront — though the corner unit appears to have since been combined with the unit beside it, leaving four separate frontages at street level today. Balustraded parapets run the length of the roofline, and the corner unit carries its own balustraded balcony beneath an octagonal timber-and-metal water tank raised above the roof.

The decorative vocabulary — balustraded parapets and balconies, moulded plaster pilasters framing the ground-floor arcade, and stucco pediments over the upper-floor windows — places the row in the High Sino-Colonial & Eclectic Stucco period (1900s–1910s), when Bangkok’s Chinese merchant builders began reaching directly for a full European classical vocabulary rather than layering Chinese ornament onto the earlier shophouse form. Diamond-lattice ventilation grilles set into the wall above several windows served the same purpose as the plainer barred vents of earlier decades, keeping air moving through the upper floor before electric fans. Where render has fallen away at the rear of the building, the load-bearing brick underneath is exposed — confirming construction predates the reinforced-concrete framing that became standard once the Art Deco period began in the 1920s.

Ground-floor shopfronts are fitted with retractable steel accordion gates (ประตูเหล็กยืด) — commonly assumed to be a mid-century fixture, though the type is now understood to date to the late 1920s–1930s (see Shophouse Styles), making these a later retrofit onto an older row rather than an original feature.

The building’s name on this site is taken from the only shop sign to survive on the block: a carved, bilingual Thai and Chinese sign above one ground-floor shopfront, still bearing the row’s old address numbers, 717–719. It names a single shop within the row, not the row as a whole — what kind of business it was hasn’t been established.