NovA shophouse staircase decides how independent the floors can be
Why vertical circulation can matter more than floor area when a Phnom Penh shophouse is meant to combine retail, office, residential or separate tenant uses.
This article reflects the named expert’s practical perspective. See NovAsia’s editorial policy for how material is prepared and reviewed.
A shophouse can look wonderfully flexible on paper. Retail at street level, an office above, perhaps living space on the upper floor. The floor areas may be generous and each level may have a door of its own. Then you walk the building and discover that everyone reaches those levels through the same staircase beginning at the back of the shop.
That staircase can define the practical relationship between the floors more clearly than the room count does.
For an initial site assessment, I am interested in the full path from the street to each use. I am not deciding whether the floors can be legally subdivided, whether a new stair can be constructed or whether a particular configuration satisfies technical rules. Those are separate questions. First I want to know whether the building, as it stands, supports the owner’s operating idea without requiring every user to depend on somebody else’s space.
Follow every user from the street to the floor they need
Take a hypothetical three-storey shophouse. The buyer wants a shop on the ground floor, a small office on the second and a home on the third. If the staircase starts inside the retail floor, the upper levels are not operationally independent merely because they are upstairs.
An office employee arriving before the shop opens may need access through the retail premises. A resident returning late may have to pass through a business that is still trading or has already been locked. A delivery to the office may cross customer space. A guest visiting the home may enter an area the retailer thinks of as private after hours.
For one family business, that arrangement may be perfectly acceptable. Everyone has the same keys, similar hours and a shared understanding of the building. For separate tenants it is a different proposition. Their opening times, privacy expectations and responsibility for shared areas may not align.
This is why I physically walk the routes instead of stopping at the statement “three usable floors”. I want to know where a person enters, which doors must be open, who controls them and what space that person crosses before reaching the destination.
A second street door can help, but it is not automatically a complete solution. It may lead to a tiny vestibule before the routes merge again. The stair may still pass through storage belonging to the ground-floor tenant. The landing may contain shared services or access to spaces that both occupiers need. Independence has to be read as a sequence, not as a label attached to one door.
The same exercise is useful even when the buyer plans to occupy the entire building. A family living above a shop may be comfortable with a shared route during the day but dislike bringing evening guests through the closed business. An office on the upper floor may work well until client meetings begin while retail customers are queuing below. A floor that seems surplus today may later become hard to let independently because the circulation was never designed for another user.
Independence is a bundle of practical conditions, not a promise in the listing
When a seller says that the upper floors “can be rented separately”, I treat that as a question to investigate, not as a finished characteristic of the asset.
Physical access is the first part. Can each user enter during their own working or living hours? Do they have to cross another occupier’s controlled area? Is there a shared corridor that both sides can use without negotiation every day? Where do visitors wait? Where do cleaners, repair contractors and deliveries go?
Then there are issues that the first visit cannot settle. If the buyer wants to add a new staircase, open another entrance or materially change the internal arrangement, technical and regulatory review becomes necessary. The fact that a wall appears removable or that there seems to be enough space beside the building does not establish that the work can or should be done. The field visit should identify the dependency, not invent the solution.
I also avoid turning circulation into a legal conclusion about leasing structure. A building may look like two independent premises and still require document review before a buyer relies on that separation. The reverse can happen too: one connected building may work extremely well for a single operator because its users actually benefit from shared movement.
What matters at the first-selection stage is whether the geometry matches the intended relationship between people. If the buyer wants one business and one household to share the property closely, an internal stair may be efficient. If the plan depends on unrelated occupiers who need different hours and privacy, the same stair may become the central weakness of the asset.
That gives the next stage a clear purpose. Instead of ordering broad due diligence with no hierarchy, the buyer can say: we need to know whether independent access can be established, what existing areas are shared and what changes would require specialist approval. If the answer would not rescue the intended use anyway, the property can be excluded earlier.
A staircase is a small piece of a building, but it reveals how the floors actually relate. Reading that relationship before talking about yield or flexibility is often the faster way to understand what the shophouse can realistically become.
Sources
- NovAsia — “Lyheng Chan — land, shophouses and commercial real estate in Phnom Penh”; field-first assessment of entrances, circulation and practical use, checked 6 October 2026.
- NovAsia — “Property types in Cambodia: rights, models and verification”; current context on shophouses as mixed commercial and residential property, checked 6 October 2026.