YTL Residence in Kuala Lumpur

This wild, architecture, and ethnic diversity is the backdrop for a futuristic yet traditional house that is as eclectic as KL itself. Parisian interior and product designer Patrick Jouin and partner Sanjit Manku, a Kenyan-born Canadian architect, designed the mammoth 32,000-square-foot residence and reception suites for three generations of a prominent Malaysian Family.
Paris-based Agence Jouin Manku took on its first large-scale integrated architectural and interior design commission in 2003, when YTL Design Group from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, invited it to design the residence of a Malaysian power family
Jouin Manku, overseeing interiors and architecture and Patrick Jouin ID focus on industrial design.

Grandparents, parents, and seven children ranging in age from 10 to 22 have the run of three floors comprising nine bedrooms, living and family areas, Western-style and open-air Chinese kitchens, an outdoor breakfast terrace, a formal library, a game room, and a swimming pool. A pair of guest suites is housed in a semi-detached boomerang-shape wing that’s cantilevered out over the hillside. Sweeping terraces, filled with gardens and shady spots for afternoon tea, surround the residence.

Completed in the latter part of 2008, the residence is the ultimate expression of the taste, influence and industrial-scale capabilities of the prominent family whose entrepreneurial activities have shaped Kuala Lumpur’s skyline.

The house also includes a formal dining room, a ballroom, chapel, 21 bathrooms, a swimming pool, two guest suites plus indoor private and guest parking. The adjoining ballroom can accommodate as many as 200 people for receptions that include a Chinese New Year’s banquet.

The initial sketches exploring the owners’ usage requirements reveal resemblances to the boring stacked-boxes look still so ubiquitous in residential architecture.

The house itself is a long, faceted three-part tube bent around the pool and ringed by ribbons of paved and planted terraces. The glazed walls slide open to the pool on one side, to the sequestered breakfast terrace on the other. The library and family bedrooms occupy a two-story volume that appears to float above the transparent base.

Inside, prominent examples of this curvilinear elegance include the amazing staircases resembling the inside of a shell.

The curved walls both inside and out have a functional purpose of providing privacy and enclosing each function gently in its own space. The overall sweeping feel inside the spaces invites the viewer in and creates soft, arching vistas.