Crazy Rich Asians Home|Belanda House|Asia's Most Luxurious Mansion|Modern Extraordinary Architecture

Hello, my name is Alex Lee and I am from Design Seeds. Some time ago, we featured an episode with the head of region of Asia and India from the Big Dutchman Group, Jan Hofstede. And he invited us to film his home. Jan was like, you have to visit my place. It's in the Hollywood movie, Crazy Rich Asian. And I stopped immediately with whatever I was doing at that moment and said, let's do it, Jan. Let's go. Before we begin, if you're not subscribed to our channel yet, do it now and click on the subscribe button and turn on the notification buzzer to stay in the loop of more fascinating design contents. The Blander house is named after the Dutch family's country origin where Jan and Ineke originated from, the Netherlands. Sitting on the edge of the hill, overlooking a mesmerizing view of the lush forest reserve of Damansara Country Heights. We wanted a resort style living because we like the outside. Malaysia, we like the weather, especially in the evening. So when we're in Holland, in the summer, everybody sits outside. Here you have summer 365 days a year, right? So why not sit outside here as well? When you look from the front of the house, it looks very modest. But it's built attached to the hill, so the thing is going down, you know. When you enter the house, it really opens up to the whole house and to the jungle and to the view. Yeah, that was also meant to be like that. Oh, the wow factor, they call it, the wow factor. Yes, we wanted to have a house that goes with natural elements. So stone, wood. What we wanted is that the house becomes part of nature and then just floats over the trees and be part of that. Hi, my name is Stephanie Mignon. I'm co-founder of 29design together with Amanda Tay. And I'm joining you from Toronto, Canada, where I'm currently based. A client came to us and they had two big asks. The first big ask was to befriend the terrain. Their site is a 34 degree slope, sloping down from the entrance. So quite a challenge. They wanted to minimize disruption and disturbing the slope and leave as much vegetation there as possible. And the second big ask was to maximize outdoor living. We were inspired by Balinese vernacular architecture and how it was actually composed of a collection of buildings organized by a program. And so we used that as a starting point and organized it into three pavilions. So we had the first pavilion, which is actually completely on the flat platform at the top of the slope, which is a pavilion for cooking, dining and housing guests. And so we created a ground floor to be a very easily accessible and navigable space. And then we envisioned a second pavilion, which is the family pavilion, which is half on the flat platform and half cantilevered over the slope. And then we have the third pavilion, which is the most dramatic pavilion, which is on pilotis, cantilevered out over the slope entirely. And that is the living pavilion. To connect them, we envisioned rather than walking across a garden, we actually connected them with bridges. So there's an experience of crossing through a bridge in the treetops to go from one program to another, which we thought was a way to also incorporate this experience of the garden and the jungle throughout the house. Part of the brief that the client gave us was also to not just house themselves and their family, but find homes for their art. The idea behind that was we had a lot of things we collected in different countries that we really liked and we wanted to display them in a certain way. The feature work came across that is still a bit separated, but also still the wind goes through and you can display your ornaments that we bought in a way that we really liked. In maximizing indoor-outdoor living and also maximizing openness to the outdoors, the roof actually plays a very important role. So we wanted to really articulate the three pavilion concept with three different roofs that have very deep overhang so that we can maximize the amount of glass and have it still be comfortable. To have this floating ceiling in the middle and then have to root above that, especially at night because there's light underneath there, it looks really, really pretty. So if we watch television at night, we normally have everything open and you feel the wind and we're watching television having the nice valley behind us. You feel like you're sitting outside. I am afraid of heights. I told them, I said, I need to feel completely safe here. And the measurements of the glass, it is normally lower, but I asked them to do it thicker, higher, also because I'm quite tall, that I didn't have the feeling I was going over. So if I stand here now, I absolutely don't have a problem with it. It really feels natural for me to stand there and safe. And I think that it created a really good balconies for us, especially this one. This is really goes out. You sit here that you feel you're part of the jungle, especially in the evening. You see all the birds coming and it's just beautiful. And also sitting here, just overseeing the city there, the rain coming, the lightning and the thunder. I think it's great to sit here. I would normally sit here as long as I can. When building on a slope, the engineer designed micropiles as a structure. They started at the bottom of the slope and created the structure, the substructure for each column coming down without disturbing, again, the rest of the slope and work their way up to the top. The platforms that they built for the lower micropiles that went in, you couldn't even see it from the top of the slope. And the workers had to kind of hike down there to the machine and drill in the micropiles. If you live on the hill, you have stairs, so you might as well make it into something nice. So that's why we have, you know, the different levels and for planter boxes and some art and so on, just to make it into a feature. That was a very challenging staircase to design. The entire stair actually cantilevered off of two vertical concrete columns which are cladded in a dark grey spray-on concrete finish. The engineer really scratched his head on that. You know, when you're on a slope, you have to find a way to connect spaces that might be on a different level, right? You know, find a way to connect them ceremoniously. I'd like to say, you know, in terms of having a client who had such an appreciation of the Malaysian climate, we ended up naming the house the Balanda House because they are a Dutch client, but they were so in tune with the surroundings in Malaysia that we gave them, they gave their house a Malay name. Balanda is Dutch, obviously, in Bahasa Melayu. So that's the reason for the name of the house. Some people say, if you build a house, if you and your wife can handle that, then your marriage is good enough, you know? And we still, up till today, we're very happy with it because it's quite unique. It's unlike most, I would say, Asian houses. It's open. Designing in the tropics is really, for modern architecture, it's a unique opportunity to really have a connection and really minimize the architecture and kind of open it up and connect to the elements as much as possible. There's less barriers between inside and outside in the tropics, and that makes for a really exciting modern architecture. And so that's been a real treat. Yet another astonishing episode of one of Malaysia's most extraordinary homes taking full advantage of the tropical climate. We hope some of our videos can convey a message across to all our viewers to be courageous and like-minded to learn to appreciate what's there for us in the tropical environment we call home. Learn to appreciate the rain, sun, and the tropical breeze connecting to nature. My name is Alex Lee, and I am from Design Seeds. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please subscribe to our channel and stay tuned to more compelling upcoming episodes. Thank you for watching.