Interior design in Damansara Utama (Uptown)

Interior designer in Petaling Jaya

If your home is an intermediate terrace, daylight reaches it from the front and the back only. The lot is 22 or 23 ft wide and 70 or 75 ft deep, so the middle of the house sits furthest from both.

That middle is where we’d use pale, matte finishes, hang a mirror to catch the garden end, and put the lighting on more than one circuit, so the room never depends on a single ceiling light.

At Uptown Residences the problem turns round. A Family Tower living room can be up to 21 ft wide, with 2.4 m windows on more than one side, since every home there is a corner or semi-detached unit. The glass brings glare, and the width can leave one sofa looking stranded, so we’d give the room two seating groups on their own rugs, and a sheer in front of a dim-out blind.

Before you buy anything, notice where you settle with a book on a weekend morning. That spot is where the room wants its main chair.

EdgeProp described Damansara Utama in 2017 as See Hoy Chan’s freehold township of almost 3,000 terraced, semi-detached and detached houses and more than 300 shophouses, with little land left to build on. SS20, across the Damansara–Puchong Expressway, is Damansara Kim, a separate township.

The shops came first. See Hoy Chan built Uptown’s commercial centre from the early 1980s, beginning with the Uptown 1, 2, 3 and 5 office blocks, and The Starling mall joined it in 2016, with a 50,000 sq ft rooftop park and 3,333 parking bays. Before the mall, double-parking was common, and The Edge still counted congestion an issue in 2020, so for a house near the shoplots we’d book lorries for early weekday mornings.

Families here use SK Damansara Utama and SMK Damansara Utama, the area’s state schools, and KPJ Damansara Specialist Hospital stands on Jalan SS20/10, on the Damansara Kim side of the LDP.

If your apartment is in the Family Tower, your front door opens from a lift lobby that serves your home alone, so that lobby is really your foyer. A bench, closed shoe storage and a warm wall light there are the first things we’d design.

If it’s in the Lifestyle Tower, the homes are open-plan one-bedrooms of 734 to 1,040 sq ft around a central core of four lifts. Every cupboard counts there, and a table that doubles as a desk earns its place. Some were sold furnished, listings say, with a utility cabinet called a ‘U-box’; if yours has one, it’s worth keeping.

These are resale homes, about ten years old, so a past owner’s renovation may be part of what you bought, and the developer’s defect period has long ended. At the site visit we’d open the cabinets under the sinks and look at the wiring, because in a home this age that is where surprises hide.

The Family Tower has five designs, from 1,687 to 2,516 sq ft, and four penthouses of 4,992 to 6,548 sq ft; each home comes with three parking bays, the penthouses six. The towers belong to See Hoy Chan’s UPtown scheme, alongside The Starling mall, Somerset Damansara Uptown and the 31-storey Imazium office tower.

In a Family Tower home about ten years on, the two kitchens age differently. The wet kitchen’s cabinets, plumbing and hood take the hard use and are the likelier to need work; the dry kitchen may need only new fronts and lighting.

Settled

In a home about ten years old, we’d see what the last owner changed before drawing anything new.

• 1Uptown ResidencesAbout 2015Family Tower homes open from a private lift lobby; Lifestyle Tower one-bedrooms share a core of four lifts.

A terrace and a tower apartment are priced by the same rule. If you’re weighing a terrace against an apartment in the towers, you may wonder whether the house costs more to design.

Only by the rooms you add. Our fee counts rooms, so a terrace’s longer list shows up as more rooms, never as a charge on floor area.

Walk the house once with the floor plan and a pencil, and circle the rooms you’d leave just as they are. Those are the rooms you won’t pay us for.

Start with the kind of home you have, then add or drop rooms. Nothing you type leaves this page.

Estimates at October 2026 rates. All three homes are larger than 1,200 sq ft; the upper figure adds two rooms you might choose later, a bathroom, say, or a study.

If yours is a house, there’s no Damansara Utama figure to lean on yet. The published terrace records are pooled with Damansara Jaya and Damansara Kim, and the index says no single township has enough for a median of its own.

One more record carries a Damansara Utama label: a 2,522 sq ft home called The Nine, at RM500,000 and 36 weeks, three times the 12-week median of the condo records. Landed renovations published by other firms across KL and PJ ran a median of 19 weeks.

If you’d like a larger kitchen at the back of a terrace, MBPJ has a standard plan for it, as long as the original walls stay.

Take a wall out and it becomes a full submission. So before we draw, we check any past extension on your house against its approved plans.

Who says yes in Damansara Utama

We’d ask for your house’s approved plans early, because they decide which route the council takes.

• MBPJ, for a terraceStandard plans cover a rear kitchen extension that keeps the original walls, and a front roof extension; a porch roof can become an upper balcony set 14 ft back from the front boundary.
• MBPJ, for other additionsPlans from a registered architect, engineer or draughtsperson, about 14 working days to approve, and a dilapidation report on the neighbouring houses.
• Uptown Residences’ managementAgrees in writing before work starts. Its deposit, hours and lift booking aren’t published, so we ask the office before anyone quotes.

Rewiring, retiling or built-in cabinets need MBPJ’s minor works permit, approved in 24 working hours. Call us before you ask a contractor to quote, so the drawings come first. The full process