Core Design Workshop

“I am a Malaysian Hikikomori, and this is my story ” an online article that I came about reading during the lockdown periods in the year 2020 that tells a story of an extreme introvert with her social discrimination and how she sees people follow society’s made-up standards where ones have to act a certain way to be accepted. It was only when the Covid-19 pandemic hit with its lockdowns, she felt for the first time in life as if she was alive and normal, at least to the eyes of society, as she was living fully as before while others were struggling to cope for simply being at home.

Introverse was born out of this social context, where the rights in our social perception could have been wrong and the wrongs were right. If we could ditch the influence of social perception in our mind, we may possibly find new paths to progress onward instead of wandering on the status quo.

Introverse is a newly renovated home for myself an architect, my wife a contemporary art gallerist cum avid collector of Malaysian contemporary arts and our four years old son. In 2019 I was diagnosed with vocal cord cancer, and since I have learned to embrace the introverted character in me. My wife and I initiated this very own project of ours in 2020. from inception, conceptualisation, design and to the long haul construction, the project spanned through the entire 2 years of the pandemic period.

A remodelling to a single-storey semi-detached house in a suburban township that was developed and built in the 1970’s outside of Kuala Lumpur, Introverse defies the social norms and puts a new living to its test, a living in where a home is organised in the introversion manner, contrary to the normal outward-looking houses.

The architecture of Introverse takes precedence in redefining the garden to a house. It started with a full-height linear garden wall, suspended on a steel structure, hovering above ground running along 10 feet from the perimeter fencing, creating a new walled garden within a garden. Separated from the outer garden, the inner garden, mirroring the ancient Chinese architecture or the Japanese’s Zen Garden, sees a new purpose. It is an outdoor space where one can live without the constraints of security and privacy, a garden where one can utilise and enjoy at the same time. It is within this walled garden area where the wet rooms of the house, the kitchen and the bathrooms are found, integrated freely with no physical walls defining the individual areas.