Interior designer at One Menerung

At One Menerung, the smallest home is about 3,000 sq ft. BRDB completed the estate in 2009 on Jalan Menerung, a short walk behind Bangsar Shopping Centre. GDP Architects set its freehold homes in two towers and three lower blocks, strung along a tree-lined promenade. Most households here have more rooms than they ever fill.

So we begin by following a weekday through your plan: who's up first, which rooms fill after school, and where everyone settles at night. Then any room the day never reaches is given a part to play.

In the townhouses, a home runs over several storeys, and the stairs and landings become rooms in their own right. Light on every flight, storage beside the stairs, and one early decision: which floor sleeps, and which receives guests. If a landing has a window, give it a seat. A runner on the stairs keeps late footsteps quiet. Each level is planned before a chair is bought.

In the largest homes, above 8,000 sq ft, the walk between rooms needs designing too. A lamp glowing where a long corridor ends. A chair halfway along, by a window if there is one. A painting where the eye comes to rest. Then the passage is somewhere to linger, not just the way through it.

Sizes from listings, a 2010 iProperty write-up and one recorded sale.

Where the trees fill your windows at One Menerung, the daylight comes in green, filtered through the leaves. Mornings are bright and leafy. By the time the lamps should be on, the long rooms have grown shadowy. In rooms this size, light is half the design, and here it starts in the trees.

A window shaded by trees wants less covering than you'd think: a fine sheer for the brightest hours, and open glass otherwise. Tall cupboards stand away from the windows, and the trees stay in the picture. Where a bedroom needs the dark, a lined curtain goes on a second track, and the sheer stays. In a bedroom facing the trees, you wake slowly, the leaves holding back the first sun.

Deep in a long room, the far wall is often the dimmest. A mirror placed to catch the window carries the green further in.

Green light shifts colour, too. A cool white wall can turn faintly grey, and a stark white sofa a little cold. So we choose whites with a touch of warmth, timber in middle tones, and fabrics that look as right in leaf shade as by lamplight. With so much green outside, there's no need to add more. Terracotta, ochre and warm stone answer it better, and brass warms in this light where chrome looks cold.

After an afternoon storm, the leaves keep dripping long after the rain stops. Leave the forest-side window ajar, and the room fills with the smell of wet earth.

The air stays damp, though. Wool, linen and oiled timber cope well with it. Lacquer and thin veneer struggle, and we'd rather not use them. A wardrobe on an outside wall wants a little air behind it, so the clothes stay fresh through the rains.

On a bright morning, the leaves throw moving shadows across the floor. Keep the floor plain where they fall, and they become its pattern.

Before you choose a single finish, stand in your living room at seven in the evening, with only the lights you have now. Notice where the room falls dark, and where you'd want to read. That short walk shapes the brief more than any sample board.

In a home of 4,000 sq ft, a grid of downlights rarely reaches the corners. The centre is bright, the edges dim, and the walls stay flat. So we light each room in layers: lights on the long walls to warm them, lamps where people sit, and dimmers on the circuits that need them.

A sofa in a long room seldom stands against a wall. It sits out in the room, facing the chairs, and its lamps need power from the floor. So the sockets beneath it are placed, with the switches by each door, before any new flooring goes down.

Then the lamps themselves, chosen like furniture. A picture light over the painting you'd like to see at night. A lamp on the side table, within reach of the sofa. Linen shades in warm white, kind to faces and to the walls alike. Put them on a timer, or on one switch by the door, so the room is lit before anyone thinks to. At dinner, candles finish it.

After dark, the windows turn into mirrors, and the forest disappears behind them. Draw the sheers at dusk, and the room stops looking back at you.

The bedrooms get the same thought. A glow at skirting height, on the way from bed to bathroom, means nobody wakes the house at three in the morning. Two bedside lamps on separate switches let one of you read while the other sleeps.

By nine, the corners glow, and nobody reaches for the ceiling switch.

The rooms here run long, and length changes how they're furnished. Pieces lined up along the walls leave an empty runway down the middle. So we furnish in groups, each with its own job and its own rug, and choose every piece with you once the walls are measured.

A long living room often works best as two places. At one end, a sofa and two chairs face each other on one rug, close enough to talk. At the other, a reading chair, a floor lamp and a low shelf of books, on a rug of their own. The first is for company. The second is yours on an ordinary Tuesday.

The right rug is usually bigger than you'd guess. Tape its outline on the floor first, and walk round it for a day before it's ordered. Under a dining table, it should reach past the chairs once they're pulled out.

Then the table. When lunch is for fourteen, a table that extends is easier to live with than one that's always long. Eight chairs around it every day, and six more that live elsewhere until they're needed. A long bench down one side seats the children without fuss. Above the table, two pendants rather than one, so both ends share the light. Chairs with arms at either end, for the hosts.

Every seat in a big room wants a surface within reach, so no cup ends up on the floor. A sideboard along the wall takes the serving dishes and the spare glasses, and gives a lamp somewhere to stand. On a long wall, one large canvas holds its own, where a row of small frames would scatter.

The bedrooms take more than a bed, too. A chaise for a slow afternoon, and a low chest at the bed's end for tomorrow's clothes.

Fewer pieces, each a little larger, and each one there for a reason. That's what keeps a big room calm.

A 4,295 sq ft four-bedroom at One Menerung can house a couple whose children are grown, or a family of six. Yours is planned around the household it holds today. Together, we'll settle who has which room, and at which hours of the day.

If yours has a family room. The 3,658 sq ft plans have one beside the living and dining rooms. Decide its role early, or the formal living room goes unused. Let the television go to the family room, with a table low enough for feet, and the living room keeps its armchairs for reading and talk.

If the children have moved out. Their rooms needn't stay as they left them. One can hold the clothes, one the books, and one stays made up for the weekends they come back.

If both of you are on calls by nine. In a large room with hard floors, a voice carries. Two desks belong in two rooms, out of each other's hearing, each quietened by a rug, a full bookcase and a lined curtain.

If there's a helper living in. Much of their day runs between the service door and the wet kitchen. Good light along that route, a shelf for the shopping as it comes in, and hooks for the market bags make each trip easier.

If your parents come to stay in the school holidays. A bedroom with its own bathroom becomes theirs for the weeks they stay, and the shaded promenade is there for an unhurried evening walk with the grandchildren.

If you're renting it out. A tenant's family wants what yours would: a clear use for every room, and surfaces built for a few years of family life. Each one is settled, and dressed, before the first viewing.

If you've lived here a long time, you'll know which tap drips, which room the afternoon sun reaches first, and which cupboard nobody opens. We'd ask you before we assume.

If you bought from someone else, the home was renovated for a different family: a study wired for one desk, wardrobes sized to someone else's clothes, a kitchen arranged for someone else's cooking. Putting small things like these right often matters more than new finishes.

A bathroom or a dry kitchen that an earlier owner redid well, and that suits your household, is kept. Where the years do show, it tends to be in three places: the bathrooms, the lights and the air-conditioning. That's where we look first, and where the budget usually goes.

A wet kitchen in good order may want only a stronger hood: if wok smoke still hangs about after dinner, that comes before any new cabinet. Save the rest for the rooms you sit in.

Sometimes nothing needs pulling out at all. New curtains, the art rehung at eye level, the sofa turned to face the trees, a rug that fits the room at last. A room you'd stopped seeing can feel like yours again. That's often where we start, and sometimes where we stop.

Keep: a dry kitchen that was done well, the helper's room, bathroom and all, and windows left clear for the trees. Adapt: any 2009 fittings that remain, and lighting that leaves a long room dim at night. Add: floor sockets where the sofa will stand, and a ventilated cupboard for the court kit. Check: when the air-conditioning was last replaced, and the waterproofing under any bathroom you keep.

The pools, the gardens and the forest around them belong to every home here. GDP Architects drew the way in as a sequence: a guardhouse built as a garden pavilion, then an enclosed plaza, then a diagonal view down a stepped garden to the clubhouse pavilion and the pool. The shared rooms sit beneath the buildings, just off the promenade.

We'd carry that idea indoors. Open your front door, and the eye should travel on a diagonal, through to a lit room or out to a window. Never onto a wall of shoes: those vanish into a cupboard beside the door.

A large household sees a lot of coming and going: drivers, a helper on errands, children back from school, friends arriving for dinner. So the keys, the access cards and the day's post wait by the door the family actually uses, and the formal entrance stays clear for guests.

Weekends here can go to the futsal and basketball court, the gym or the barbecue pit, with a swim in one of the pools after. The balls, trainers and damp kit then need a home on the way in. A ventilated cupboard near the service door takes them, and lets them dry before the next game, out of the hall. Wet towels from the pool hang there too, not over a chair.

There are two ways in, from Jalan Senduk and from the old Jalan Damansara. On works days, the management tells us which one the lorries should use, and we keep to it.

In 2020, One Menerung took Gold in EdgeProp Malaysia's awards for well-managed estates ten years and older. Works here are planned to leave it as they found it: the lift clean, the promenade clear, nothing left standing overnight.

From BRDB's description of the estate and EdgeProp Malaysia's report on its 2020 awards.

Two of One Menerung's neighbours share its developer. Next to it, on Jalan Menerung itself, BRDB's newer 111 Menerung has smaller homes, all in one tower. Serai is BRDB's development in Bukit Bandaraya, and we've also written about Palmyra, close by. For homes further afield, our Bangsar page takes in the wider neighbourhood.