HIDDEN TREASURE: A dilapidated shop house on Penang became a bright and airy island idyll thanks to the efforts of two eagle-eyed investors

Not many investors searching for a home on the northern shore of Penang would recognise the potential in a neglected mid-1980s shophouse wedged in a row of equally uninspiring commercial and industrial three-storey buildings. But in 2009, when an online search led psychotherapist Liz McIlhagger to photographs of the property that would become her second home, she and husband Des Ng, a Malaysian architect specialising in eco-sustainable design, saw a diamond in the rough.

The photographs showed a dark, dingy building that had housed a carpentry workshop on the ground floor and a travel agency on the first and second storeys, broken into office partitions. Inspecting the property in person, Des’s brother relayed more images of mildewed wall-to-wall carpeting, suspended plasterboard ceilings, and termite-riddled door and window frames. (He also pronounced the property “too industrial.”) Undeterred — and buoyed by a Google Maps search that showed the property to be close to a beach — Des and Liz purchased it in 2010 and moved in after nine months of design work and renovations. They now split their time between Oiduts House, the Penang property, and their primary home in Coleraine, Ireland.

The couple traced a circuitous road to Penang. After meeting at university in the United Kingdom in the mid-1970s, Liz and Des, who was born in Malacca, lived peripatetically. From the mid-80s through the 90s, Des worked primarily on large-scale, high-rise projects in the UK, Oman, Bahrain, New Zealand, American Samoa, Brunei, Singapore and Malaysia. Just before the turn of the century they moved to Northern Ireland, taking along fond memories of their years in Kuala Lumpur, Johor Bahru and Sab...

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