Interior designer at Core Residence

Every Core Residence layout centres on one open room. Walk in after work, and all of it is in view at once: the hob, the table, the sofa you'll sink into later. No door hides any of it. That room carries most of your days.

Core Residence's 580 homes were the first launched in Tun Razak Exchange. They fill two towers, of 50 and 44 storeys, on a freehold plot beside the 10-acre TRX park. Close by, the TRX interchange serves the Kajang and Putrajaya MRT lines, and friends can come to supper by train.

Under 400 sq ft lies between the smallest home and the largest, and in every one, the open room does the most work. In the one-bedroom, it's hall, dining room and sitting room at once. In the three-bedroom, it's where a family crosses paths all evening, on the way to homework, a bath or the fridge.

So in every plan, the open room gets our first attention: where the cooking stops, how the evening is lit, and what the eye rests on from the sofa. Get those right, and the bedrooms are the easy part.

Developed in TRX's Park Quarters by CORE Precious Development, an 80:20 venture of China Communications Construction Group and WCT Holdings (The Edge, 2020 and 2023).

Most of a Core Residence home was meant to arrive with the keys. The launch plans of 2020 list a fitted kitchen, its appliances included, a wardrobe for each bedroom, cabinets in the bathrooms and a washer-dryer. If yours came that way, it was all new, and most can stay.

Your part begins where the list ends, and much of it is soft: curtains, cushions, rugs, a throw for the arm of a chair. Start with those. They change a room fastest, and they're the easiest to change again when your taste does.

Of the fitted things, the kitchen is the one you might most want to replace, and the one that least needs it. Fresh doors and a worktop, with better light over the sink, make it feel like another kitchen, and cost far less than starting again. Ink-blue doors, say, against a pale worktop. Because the kitchen shares its room with the sofa, those doors are living-room furniture too, chosen with the rug and the cushions in mind. A full replacement makes sense only if you need more storage, or a different layout.

The wardrobes work the same way. Their frames stay, while the doors, the pulls and the fittings inside can change. Swap a plain handle for a long brass pull, and the wardrobe stops looking like everyone else's. It reads as new joinery, and little goes to the skip.

The bathroom cabinets can stay too. A good mirror above them, with light on either side, does more for your mornings than a new vanity would.

The list is the one marketed in 2020 (The Edge, February 2020), with Teka, Yale and Grohe named for the fittings: the kitchen's cabinets, hob, hood, microwave and fridge. Your sale agreement comes first where the two differ.

With no partition in any Core Residence layout, the kitchen ends wherever its smells do. Eggs, a salad, soup on a slow simmer: they stay close to the hob. Belacan frying for sambal makes it as far as the bedroom doors.

So your cooking comes first. If hot oil is a weekly thing, leave the room as open as it was drawn. If it's most evenings, a visible edge may not be enough: the kitchen may want one you can close, or air that clears faster. Both are building work, so the management sees them first, along with the route the air would take.

Then the edges. Even without walls, an open room reads best as three places: one to cook, one to eat, one to rest. Furniture can draw those lines. A rug that stops a step short of the kitchen leaves the cooking side easy to mop. A low cabinet behind the sofa serves the table: bowls, glasses, the good napkins.

The table is the hinge between them. Set closer to the kitchen, it takes plates straight from the hob. Nearer the window, if your plan allows, dinner feels a little further from the washing-up. With friends round, the cooking is half the evening. There's always someone at the hob, spoon in hand.

In a kitchen this open, even the bin is on show. A pull-out one under the sink, with a second tray for recycling, keeps it behind a door. The dish rack can hide too, in a cupboard made for it above the sink.

Draw the edges well, and the room holds all three at once. Then the wok can come out any night you like.

Look up in a Core Residence room, and if it was fitted as the launch plans describe, only the grilles give the air-conditioning away. The ducts that feed them pass above the ceiling, room to room. Nobody has published the ceiling height, and in rooms this compact, every centimetre overhead counts.

So before a light, a curtain recess or a shaped ceiling is drawn, we find the ducts. On the visit, we follow them from grille to grille and mark them on the plan. New lights then sit in the gaps between. Nothing fights the airflow, and the ceiling stays at the height it was handed over.

Moving air changes where things belong, too. A pendant hung under a grille sways all evening. A reading chair beneath one is chilly by nine. A plant set below one turns brown at the tips. So the chair moves out of the draught, the pendant hangs clear, and the plant finds a calmer corner. In a bedroom, we'd set the bed where the cool air passes by, not where it blows on your face all night.

Curtains want to hang straight. Where the ducts leave room, the track sits in a slim recess, and the fabric drops the wall's full height. Where they don't, the track runs just below the ceiling, painted to disappear.

Lamps do the rest. A small one on the kitchen counter, for coming in after dark. A floor lamp arched over that chair, in its new spot. Another set among the plants, throwing their leaves in shadow up the wall. Their bulbs are warm, never the cool white of an office. Lit low, they turn one bright open room into several quieter ones.

The ducted air-conditioning comes from the launch specification (The Edge, February 2020). We confirm what's fitted when we visit.

NRY Architects drew Core Residence's towers as crystalline boxes with green walls, around a central garden courtyard. The TRX park lies alongside. Step out, and there are trees.

Not every home looks over the park. That depends on your tower and your floor. Either way, the green comes in through what's inside: plants that cope with air-conditioning, oiled timber, linen, and colours taken from leaf and bark.

Plants first. Cool, dry air suits some better than others. A rubber plant by the glass. A pothos trailing from a high shelf. A peace lily, which droops to tell you it's thirsty. A ZZ plant for the darkest corner, which survives a missed week. Water them on a Sunday morning, and the week starts green. A tray of wet pebbles under each pot keeps the air around it a little softer.

Outside, the architects gathered the planting together, on walls and round a courtyard, and indoors it works the same way. Three pots grouped by the glass look like a garden. Dotted about, the same three look lost. Grouped, they're also easier to water in one go.

Then the materials. Oiled timber, the grain left open to the touch. Linen curtains, loose and a little creased. Wool underfoot, and a basket for the throws. For colour, borrow the park's: the green of a fern, the grey of bark, the brown of a fallen leaf. Against pale walls, a little of each is enough.

The building was planned with green of its own, too: a recreational park and an outdoor lounge on Level 7, for a coffee in the open air.

Whatever your floor, some of the park can live there too.

The towers' design is NRY Architects'. As planned at launch, Level 7 also holds a reading room, a playroom and a function hall, and Tower 1's Level 50 rooftop a gym, a wading pool and an infinity pool. Both towers were designed for GBI Gold and LEED ratings (The Edge, February 2020).

Two Core Residence homes, identical on paper, can keep very different evenings: one quiet by eight, the next full of friends at ten. Yours decides what the rooms need.

If you work in TRX and go home at weekends. The working week asks for a few things, done well. A wardrobe that holds four days of shirts. A bed you sleep deeply in. A kitchen kept to what you really cook. Then Friday's packing takes ten minutes, and Monday's unpacking five.

If two of you are starting out. One open room has to suit two people at once. A second chair, angled away from the television, gives one of you a book and the other a film. A table set for two that opens out for six waits for the first dinner with friends.

If yours has a study. The 1+1 and the 2+1 each add a small study to their bedrooms. In a home that lives mostly in one room, it can be the place for something else entirely. A desk, lit from the side, so the screen stays clear of glare. A guest bed that lifts into the wall by breakfast. Or tall shelves for luggage, the spare quilt and the lanterns kept for Mid-Autumn. Pick the one you'll use most, and furnish it for that.

If you're still choosing the furniture. At these sizes, its scale matters more than moving any wall. A sofa a little shallower. A bench at the table that slides right under it. Chairs on slim legs, so the floor runs on beneath them. Nesting side tables that pull apart for guests. Chosen to the centimetre, each piece leaves the open room its ease.

If a toddler lives here too. The hob and the play mat are in the same room here. So the kitchen side wants a gate that folds back against the wall, and the low cupboards want catches. One low drawer can stay unlatched, full of wooden spoons to bang. Rounded corners on the coffee table, or no coffee table at all until they're steady on their feet.

At Core Residence, two choices come before the rest: where the kitchen's edge falls and, in the plans that have one, what the study does. Once they're fixed, everything else is drawn around them, and few of your evenings are needed for any of it. A Saturday morning, perhaps, to choose the fabrics.

The first visit needs nobody there but us, and your list of what stays. After that, decisions reach you a few at a time, at an hour that suits you, each with what you need to decide: a drawing, a swatch to hold, a price. By email or by phone, whichever you'd rather.

We read through every price with you and query anything missing. We hold every quote to the budget we set together. Nothing changes on site without your agreement in writing, and an update comes whenever something moves: what's done, what's next, what's waiting on you.

Your neighbours ride the same lifts as the trades. So the times are settled with the management. The lift walls and the corridor floor are covered before any box comes up, and the floor is swept each evening.

If your office is in TRX too, a site meeting can fall in your lunch hour. The noisy days, within the management's hours, can pass while you're at your desk. If you're abroad, we ask only what's yours to decide. Everything else, we keep moving.

Closest to home is TRX Residences, also in Tun Razak Exchange, finished in 2024. Towards Bukit Bintang and KLCC are Agile Bukit Bintang, Times Square 2 and The Ritz-Carlton Residences. The rest of the district is on one page: KLCC, Bukit Bintang and TRX.