Taman Duta Villa came to us through Jalex, the local contractor delivering a private residence in Kuala Lumpur to designs by GA Design. Our commission was singular and specialist: a set of complete door panels finished in straw marquetry, worked into a blue starburst that reads as one continuous motif across the doors. We coordinated closely with the project team to produce the panels to their drawings, then packed and shipped them to Malaysia for assembly on site.
The marquetry doors were made for a tall back-bar cabinet in the villa. Scroll to watch the piece come together — the carcass turns, the doors travel in and seat to their hinges, and the blue starburst resolves across the base as they close.
Straw marquetry is among the most patient of the decorative crafts: split rye straw, flattened and dyed, is laid fibre by fibre so the light catches each strand differently. Here the studio worked a single blue-violet starburst whose rays radiate from a shared centre and carry across the faces of the doors, so the pattern resolves as one piece when the doors are closed.
Every strand was placed by hand, in our East London workshop, by our skilled craftspeople. The play of the fibres — the way the blue shifts from deep indigo to violet as the surface turns to the light — is the reward for that patience, and it is what makes each panel unrepeatable.
The brief was for complete door panels, not just a decorative front. Each door was built from MR MDF — moisture-resistant board, chosen for its stability and its suitability for the Malaysian climate — and the starburst runs across the show faces, with the studio also finishing the sides and the backs of every door so the marquetry reads as a solid, resolved object from any angle.
Cut-outs for the hardware were worked into the panels exactly as specified, so the handles and fittings supplied by the project team would drop straight in during assembly — no adjustment, no reworking of a finished marquetry surface on site.
Finished marquetry is delicate, and these panels had a long way to travel. Each was wrapped and cushioned with real care — protected face, edges and corners — and crated for the flight to Malaysia, where the project team assembled the doors into the joinery in their own workshop.
Coordinating to another team’s programme, on the other side of the world, is its own discipline: dimensions verified against the issued drawings, hardware cut-outs pre-worked, and packaging built to survive the handling in between.
Taman Duta is one of Kuala Lumpur’s most exclusive residential enclaves — a green, elevated pocket of the city, historically home to diplomats, royalty and the country’s business families. Its villas sit among mature trees on generous plots, with the KL skyline — the Petronas Towers, Merdeka 118 — laid out beyond.
It is the kind of address where interiors are commissioned rather than bought, and where a detail like a hand-laid straw-marquetry door is exactly the sort of quiet, specialist craftsmanship that belongs. Working with GA Design and Jalex, the studio was glad to make its small, exacting contribution to a home of this calibre.