AESTHETE EXPRESS

Crossing the boundaries of time, space, and style, Li Tim Koh redefines what it means to be an ambitious creative in modern Malaysia. A PRESTIGE 40 Under 40 honouree, he turns his visions for design, skincare, and jewellery into reality through entrepreneurship.

- ZENA KHAN

Starlight Hotel is nestled on a corner in KL’s heritage nucleus on Jalan Hang Kasturi. The area on a whole is undergoing a revamp. Driving up the road towards it (and the photoshoot for this issue’s cover) I pass by Else Hotel along Jalan Tun H S Lee, whose interiors are filled with chic contemporary art curations and concept dining spaces. Mushrooming out the back lanes are a field of hipster chic cafes and speakeasies, catering to those of us who want a glossed up local experience. Sipping a cocktail under the coquettish gaze of 1920’s Chinese girls painted across Najib Bamadhaj’s Pride and Prejudice on Concubine’s first floor walls, for example, makes one feel like a well-heeled extra in a Southeast Asian film noir. Starlight Hotel, however, feels embalmed in the Modernist era of 1970’s KL. Picking my way up three flights of stairs, I notice streams of light flooding over the patterned carpeting of the hotel, and am hit by a wave of nostalgia. Notions of architecture and design as narrators of time and space come to me.

This concept that visual, olfactory, or auditory cues can concoct holistic stories was reinforced from my first meeting with Li Tim Koh a day earlier. PRESTIGE’s September cover star and part of the PRESTIGE 40 Under 40 Class of 2024, Li Tim stands at over six feet tall. He strides over to meet me with an outstretched hand and smile that merge shyly boyish with devastatingly debonair. Almost immediately, I exclaim over his tangerine shirt. Emblazoned with grooving grizzly bears, it at once became my favourite sartorial moment of that week. “Thanks! It’s from a New York label, ‘Band of Outsiders’. It’s really old, I usually wear it on Christmas. I guess they’re party bears?” He laughs appreciatively at the compliment.