All images by Nicholas Chang for RICE Media unless otherwise stated.
When I think of home-based businesses, the genial middle-aged woman offering daycare services a block away comes to mind. So does the motherly Chinese national three blocks away I used to visit for weekly tuition sessions. And the auntie who pumps out love letter biscuits in reused Milo tins every Chinese New Year season.
But I might be giving my age away. These days, home-based businesses aren’t the sole domain of the semi-retired or stay-at-home mums looking for a side hustle. Driven by the power of social media hypetrains, they’ve become bustling hubs that attract customers from far and wide—not just a five-block radius.
Coffee nerds now hawk specialty brews to their neighbours. A banh mi stall run from an HDB flat kitchen has an hour-long waiting time. The home-based business scene is now amazingly diverse and niche—I’m pretty sure one of my neighbours charges people to print stuff using his commercial printer.
Truthfully, there’s a sense of precarity as I track the growing popularity of these new-age home businesses. While I’m rooting for their success, there’s also a fear that they’ll somehow get into trouble. Already, articles on the banh mi home hawker have attracted comments like “How can this be allowed?”
This Singaporean fear of scrutiny is palpable—several home-based businesses I approached for this article declined to be featured as they “don’t need the exposure” or “don’t want to get in trouble”.
While some might clamour for more regulations to be slapped on home businesses, I think it’s precisely the lack of regulation that’s precipitated the birth of so many hidden gems, each with its own story.
Wood-Fired Pizzas From a Front Yard
Towering trees and a muzzled dog greet me at Long Weekend Pizza. The wood-fired pizza joint operates out of a rustic little shack in the yard of 61 St Patrick’s Rd.
As its name suggests, Long Weekend is open Fridays to Sundays, 5 PM to 9 PM. Here, you can get pizzas ranging from $17 for a good ol’ classic Margherita and $23 for Meat Mania (ground beef, sausages, pepperoni, and bacon).
Brothers Dax Chew, 46, and Arnold Tay, 56, started the home-based business a year-and-a-half ago. They both have day jobs, which they decline to talk about.
It’s a Friday evening when we drop by. We’re early, but, already, a steady stream of customers are dropping by to pick up their orders. Dax and Arnold barely have time to chat as they churn pizzas out non-stop.
The business had a slow start, but thanks to several TikToks and food blog features, it’s now booming.
Like a well-oiled machine, Arnold, the ‘head chef’ of the operation, rolls out dough and adds toppings. Dax loads the pies into the oven, rotates them evenly, and delivers them hot and steaming to a rack to cool.
Interestingly, Arnold literally built the pizza oven from scratch. The one they’re using now is the seventh iteration. He’s made improvements to each iteration, though he tells me it will never be perfect.
“I’ve been in construction for most of my life, so I decided to try building an oven for fun one day,” he tells me casually, as if it’s as easy as changing a lightbulb.
“Every time you build one, you learn. You try different things. Sometimes it’s better. Sometimes it’s not. Then you tear it down and do another one. So far, this one’s doing good. I have some ideas for the next one.”
A couple of kids who’ve just finished preschool for the day walk by with their parents. When they see the oven in action, they squeal excitedly: “Pizza!” Clearly, they’re regulars at this joint.
It’s hard work—even standing a distance away, the heat from the pizza oven warms me up. I can’t imagine being up close, loading and unloading pizzas. But Dax does it without taking a break; customers are waiting.
The brothers have been living in this very house for 48 years. But Dax says this business has definitely helped them make more friends and more connections in the area.
“We developed a rather kampung-like atmosphere. People can come by with their kids, with their dogs. While the pizzas are being made, their kids jump on the trampoline in our garden.
“A lot of the customers know one another because they’re from the same condo, or from adjacent condos, or they walk the dogs together.”
Arnold jokes that he’s the happiest when they knock off. But I sense he loves the challenge of running the kitchen.
He says his proudest moment is hearing from an Italian customer that the pizza tastes like home.
“I felt like I achieved something. I’ve never tried pizza in Naples. So I’m sort of working blind—just working on instinct. And I got it right. So now the difficult part is to do it every single time.”
While I linger around the front yard, I strike up a conversation with a customer who’d stumbled upon the home pizzeria on a walk around the neighbourhood.
“I think the way that it’s set up is it’s kind of unique. And you feel like, you know, it’s something that is very different from a restaurant set-up,” Queenie Goh, who lives nearby, tells me.
“It’s more homely?” I ask.
“Yes, that’s it,” she nods enthusiastically.
That’s the thing with home-based businesses—there’s a personal touch that you don’t get from big names and franchises. And how many of them can say they’ve built their own pizza oven?
A Haircut in a Living Room
Nurkhai Arina, 29, is a sports coach for pre-school kids by day and a barber by night (and on the weekends as well).
Khai tells me she first got into hairdressing five years ago, almost serendipitously. She was getting her hair cut at a local barbershop, Doosh, when her barber mentioned in passing that he was looking for apprentices.
“I jokingly told him that he should teach me. He took it seriously.”
Then working as a videographer full-time, Khai would rush to the barbershop in Geylang after shoots to cut hair. When that Doosh outlet closed some two years back due to mounting costs, she offered her hair-cutting services from home.
“Somehow, rushing home to cut hair doesn’t seem so tiring. I’m in my own space,” Khai muses.
There’s also a sweet perk—she gets to set her prices. At Doosh, she used to charge $41. But now, without any overheads like rental, she can charge $28.
It’s a cosy set-up. Right in front of the entrance to the HDB flat at Block 218 Toa Payoh Lorong 8 is a simple wooden chair positioned in front of a full-length mirror.
When we arrive, she has a client already in the chair. It’s Ash, a regular from Khai’s days at Doosh. He travels all the way from Pasir Ris to Toa Payoh just to get his hair cut by her.
“Distance isn’t really a deterrence. If you go to a normal salon, it feels like you need to be like a professional or proper customer. Given that I’ve known Khai for a while, there’s no awkwardness. There’s more comfort,” Ash explains.
The feeling is definitely mutual. Khai says she enjoys barbering because of her chats with her clients.
“If I go too long without cutting hair, I feel strange,” she laughs.
While I get busy making friends with her three adorable cats, Khai and Ash yap away, updating each other about their jobs. Occasionally, the boldest of the three cats ambles over to sit at Ash’s feet.
Over the past few years Khai has been barbering from home, she’s built quite a roster of clients-turned-friends, she says. In fact, a few days after our chat, she’s going to attend a customer’s wedding.
Once, she had a customer text her to make an appointment not long after getting a fresh cut. She was confused because he wasn’t due for a haircut anytime soon. Turns out, he’d just gone through a breakup and wanted to get another haircut as an excuse to talk. “I told him, ‘Okay, just come over’,” she chuckles.
“A lot of them, they come because they enjoy the talking,” Khai says. “So when people ask me my unique selling point, I say I can be your friend.”
A Pet-Friendly Home Cafe
On my next home-based business jaunt, I pay a visit to a young entrepreneur. Coffee Near Me at 20 Casuarina Walk is another home-based business that’s been making the rounds on TikTok, and I am nothing if not easily influenced.
It’s pouring when I pull up to the landed house, but there’s still a small crowd hanging out on the driveway, sipping coffee on camping chairs.
Coffee Near Me is the brainchild of 21-year-old student Sonia Lim. Currently taking a break from her studies after graduating from Sonic Arts at Republic Polytechnic, she wanted to do something productive with her time.
She was also inspired to start the business because there weren’t any cafes within her landed estate. “My weekends have become more meaningful actually,” she confesses. “Usually, I just stay home and do nothing.”
On weekends and public holidays, from 9 AM to 3:30 PM, the Lim family opens their driveway to sell coffee, matcha, and assorted bakes. An Americano goes for $3.50. If you’re feeling a little fancier, a Spanish latte will cost you $5.
Though the offerings are as good as anything you’d find at a typical cafe—better, even—they’re a little more affordable. But perhaps the appeal of Coffee Near Me is that it doesn’t try to be your typical cafe.
For one, it’s a family affair—her mother and brother help to take orders, though Sonia is the only person churning out drinks.
“I like making coffee, but I’m the only one at home who likes coffee. So I wanted to meet more people and also make more coffee,” she explains.
Plus, she’s particular with her ingredient measurements, so she prefers to do it herself. The home-based business was also a good excuse to upgrade her coffee machine to a premium Lelit Bianca, she confesses.
Another thing about Coffee Near Me is its authenticity and unpretentiousness. In a saturated cafe market, most tend to have the same tired, generic look and feel.
It’s refreshing to kick your feet up and nurse a coffee from a foldable chair in front of someone’s house, enjoying a menu that evolves week by week because it’s dependent on what they feel like baking.
Despite the rain, customers stream in. Sonia has to run off mid-chat to whip up their drinks. A jovial-looking auntie who lives nearby chats up a storm with Sonia’s mum. A family of six pops by with their pup.
Sonia, an animal lover, says seeing her neighbours’ dogs is probably the biggest highlight. All pets are welcome, she adds. Apparently, it’s not uncommon for customers to bring their cats as well. Someone once brought a hamster.
“It was running all over their table,” she laughs.
It’s this sort of vibe that’s impossible to recreate anywhere outside of home. Indeed, Sonia is realistic when we discuss Coffee Near Me’s future.
Cafes are a dime a dozen, and the market is highly saturated, Sonia muses. She’s under no illusions that transplanting Coffee Near Me to a brick-and-mortar stall will succeed. Rather, it’s this ineffable “homely vibe” that’s attracted so many (some from as far as Clementi!) to her cafe.
Scones From A Clementi Kitchen
If the stacks of baking supplies in Kelly Lim’s Clementi flat didn’t give it away, the buttery scent of her home is probably the biggest indicator that you’re in the residence of a home baker.
Since the end of last year, Kelly has been selling her scones under the moniker The Scone Club.
Kelly, an avid baker, tells me that she fell in love with scones after several holidays in the UK. But she couldn’t find ones up to her standards when she returned to Singapore. So she started baking her own.
She hatched the idea to start selling her scones when she realised that others, like her, were on the hunt for good scones locally. It also didn’t help that she was impacted by tech layoffs in 2023.
Her twenties were all about the corporate life. But getting laid off allowed her to re-evaluate her career path and redefine her thirties, she reflects.
“With the rampant layoffs and the cutbacks in benefits, which I experienced both myself, I didn’t feel compelled to return to tech or even corporate life at the moment.”
She’s also planning to start a family soon, and being based at home will let her spend more time with her kid, she adds.
“This gives me the flexibility to be then a primary caregiver while still having a fulfilling identity as a business owner. My identity won’t be solely limited to being a mother only.”
Unlike the other home-based businesses I explored, Kelly doesn’t open her house to customers. Instead, she opens pre-orders for self-collection and delivery monthly. But that also means that she wears several hats—when she’s not baking, she’s often out and about delivering scones islandwide.
I catch her on a particularly hectic day when she’s rushing out orders for a company’s festive gift packs. On days like these, she’s up baking at 4 AM to deliver fresh scones at 9:30 AM.
It’s gruelling work—12-hour days in the kitchen—but it’s work she loves. She tries to carve out time for her family and friends, but the kitchen always beckons her back. Still, she has no regrets about leaving the corporate world to run her own show, she says.
“I never really understood what it was like when people talk about enjoying work to the point where it doesn’t feel like work. Now I know.”
I’m reminded of Arnold’s fascination with optimising his pizza oven when Kelly geeks out about perfecting her scone recipes.
“I’m constantly working on it, tweaking it and improving it based on customers’ feedback,” she says. “And also, my goal is to create a tailored recipe for every single flavour instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach.”
For example, her bacon and cheese scone would require less butter than an original scone since the bacon would already contain some fat, she explains.
This freedom to focus singularly on creating the perfect scone and the freedom to unleash her creativity have been the biggest highlights of her journey.
“Being able to build my own brand, my own marketing strategy, has been such a joy. When I was doing marketing in tech back then, I had to adhere to very strict corporate brand guidelines.”
“The fact that I and so many others can do this from home with minimal sunk costs is a positive trend. We are very blessed.”
No Place Like Home-Based Businesses
For a nation that is sometimes accused of being sterile, I’d argue that our booming home-based business scene proves quite the opposite.
In the businesses I’ve visited, I see a kind of creative freedom that’s becoming increasingly rare in Singapore. I see spaces where communities are being built, both online and offline. I see the magic that happens when people have free reign to pursue their passions without overheads, well, hanging over their heads.
At the root of it is a search for authenticity. Sure, we could get our pastries, pizzas, and haircuts from big chains and franchises. But it feels better when the local businesses we support have a story. When you can tell that they really love what they do. When they genuinely want to connect with you and, quite literally, open their homes to you.
And that’s probably why, despite being a people obsessed with efficiency and quickness, we’re willing to pre-order our scones weeks in advance. We sit on someone else’s driveway sipping coffee when we do the same at home. We cross the island for a haircut and banter with a friendly barber.
We’re always looking for people and places that feel like home.
