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Alongside the photograph above, a sketch rendering of the Fazal Building isolates its facade from the wiring, signage, and street clutter that a straight photograph inevitably includes, giving a clearer read of the building’s proportions and detailing.

A second sketch imagines how the ground floor may have originally looked, before the current metal shutters replaced what was likely a glass-and-timber shopfront typical of department stores from this period — part of the same effort to build up a clearer visual record ahead of the fuller write-up still to come.

A third sketch takes a different approach: rather than imagining the shopfront as it may have first appeared, it renders the building as it stands today, with its original wooden-framed shopfront doors intact rather than lost. The building dates to around 1931, a period when Bangkok’s larger commercial buildings already had ready access to glass panes and the craftsmen skilled enough to fit them — a glazed timber shopfront of this kind would have been an established feature for a department store of this scale by then, not a later or unusual addition.

A fourth sketch turns from the building’s exterior to imagine its life as a working department store. Picture the E.M. Katib storefront at sunset, its windows glowing as shoppers pass on Bamrung Mueang Road, the goods laid out inside catching the light — dry goods, fabric, and the kind of imported wares that drew customers to a store of this scale in early twentieth-century Bangkok. No photograph of the interior from this period is known to survive, so this scene stays speculative, offered as a sense of the atmosphere the building might once have held rather than a documented record.