SEALED WITH A KISS

Zena Khan takes an intimate look into the beautiful life of Adam and Dianthus Kiss.

“She grew up in beauty.” Adam Kiss’ evaluation of his wife Dianthus’ childhood emulates the opening of a stanza. This is to be expected. After all, he is married to a poet of the senses, whose world is cocooned in aesthetic lines of beauty and quality. Together, this couple marry their respective strengths—his penchant for logistics and rationality tinged by madcap adventures with her tactile and sensorial nature—to tailor a life reverberating with personality.

Dianthus and Adam’s marital home in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, that they moved into five months ago, reflects this notion of uniting the unexpected. The location they chose to live in immediately makes this palpable. Standing on their balcony I was treated to a panoramic view that sweeps across dense rainforest and the old bungalows of Ampang, to the modern concrete skyscrapers delineating our contemporary downtown environment. Harmonious opposites abound inside too; they seep out from the wide-ranging subjects of the books that fill their library shelves or litany of objects dotted across their split level home. Most of all it lives in the personalities and interactions of Dianthus, Adam, and their Nebelung cat Miska (also known as Tubby, T, or Sir Tubbington).