The Green House Effect

WHBC Architects' concrete tropical box embraces the lush jungle and manages to blur the lines between inside and outside

Like luxury cars, designer handbags, and high-end mechanical watches, palatial homes are often built to telegraph wealth. Its size, locale, and contents are brandished like a kind of status symbol to communicate to the world at large that "I've made it!" Nonetheless, even in a city with its fair share of conspicuous consumers like Kuala Lumpur, there are those who place importance on other values.

A wonderful example of this backlash of bigger-is-better, and rejection that flash-is-best, is the Chempenai House, an intimate, almost minimalistic dwelling designed by WHBC Architects. The house displays an adherence to modernist principles, as well as an affinity with their immediate surroundings.