Sunrise over the lost country estate at Mount Rosie

6.57 am, 3 April 2014, the colours of the new day, as was seen from Mount Rosie Road, close to it junction with Chancery Lane. It was in this vicinity that what must have been a very grand wooden bungalow from which the area got its name, Mount Rosie, had once stood as the centrepiece of a vast country estate.

Built in the 1880s as the residence of Mr. Theodore Heinrich Sohst, a German trader who once served as the Acting German Consul to Singapore as well as the Honorary President of the Teutonia Club, the bungalow, as was the country estate it stood as the centrepiece of, was named after Mrs Sohst, Rosie de Souza who was of Eurasian heritage and whom he married in 1868.

The grand residence, described as a “princely establishment”, was built to be spacious and airy with generously large verandahs arranged around it, in the fashion of the stately homes of the well-heeled that did come up in the early days of Singapore. It had a magnificent position from which it commanded a view of the expansive estate, having been placed “on top of a hill with a fine stretch of open country around it”, and it must have been been a sight to behold, a focal point not just of the estate, but also of social life as it had been known to be.

Coming ashore in 1865, Mr. Sohst’s career here spanned a significant proportion of the history of the trading firm, Puttfarcken, Rheiner and Company, having arrived just seven years after it was established, serving as its Managing Partner at the time of its liquidation in 1906 when it had been renamed Puttfarcken and Company.

With the passing of Mr Sohst in January 1912, there were to be several more occupants of the bungalow. One was a Mr. Frank Adam, the General Manager of the Straits Trading Company, before it was first leased, from the early 1920s to the War Office, reportedly at a large cost. This was for use as a temporary residence of the British General Officer Commanding (GOC) of Malaya and it was during this time that Mount Rosie was renamed as Flagstaff House, in 1925.

With the completion of a purpose built Flagstaff House in 1938 (now Command House), the bungalow passed into the hands of Raffles College. As Mount Rosie Hostel, it was used as to house female students at the college (and later the University of Malaya) until 1958. It was used temporarily as a home for old folks after this, when a place was needed to house residents of Nantina Home in Queen Street, when that was closed in 1959.

A view of what Mount Rosie did look like can be found in this article, $100,000 House for Malays’s G.O.C., in the 14 March 1937 edition of The Straits Times.