Built with love
A FEW years ago, Atiqah Nadiah Zailani had her heart set on a small apartment going for half a million Ringgit in Petaling Jaya, Selangor.
Just as she was about to make her purchase, Atiqah received an overseas work assignment that took her to Tanzania, so she decided to put the high-rise on the backburner.
There, Atiqah, who was born and bred in Kuala Lumpur, caught a glimpse of an alternative way of living.
“The Maasai people (an ethnic group living in Tanzania and Kenya) live in huts measuring less than 100 sq ft (9.29 sq m). That’s because a lot of their life happens outdoors; indoors is just a place to rest.
“Since I’m also an outdoorsy person, I was leaning towards that lifestyle.”
Around the same time, Atiqah was also inspired by the tiny-house movement, where people opt for smaller living spaces to lead a simpler life, that was sweeping across the United States, New Zealand and Australia.
“A lot of people were putting up stories and videos of how they built and designed their own houses, and I thought, ‘How hard can it be?’”
Atiqah, who has no design or architectural background, started sketching the designs for her new home.
“My dad is an architect. That’s as far as it goes,” says the 31-year-old who works as an international development consultant.
“I just asked myself, ‘Do I cook a lot?’ Not really. So I don’t need a massive kitchen,” she says, about drafting the blueprint for her ideal living space. “Instead, I spend a lot of time in my bedroom and at my work desk, so I want that to be a big, beautiful space.”
After returning from Tanzania, she began searching for plots of land, on an online marketplace. Atiqah says this was the most tiresome part of the process as she initially knew very little about where to look for land going for sale.
Six months later, she finally settled on a piece of one-acre (0.4ha) land in Behrang, a small town at the Perak-Selangor border about 100km from KL. “It’s got all these tall trees, and it overlooks Banjaran Titiwangsa.”
While Atiqah had a firm idea of the house design, she needed professional help to make her dream home a reality.
When it came to the nitty-gritty aspects of building the house – structural concerns, sourcing for materials, and so on – Atiqah hired designers and architects from Epic Homes, a social enterprise that mobilises volunteers to build homes for the orang asli, as well as other technicians where specific know-how was required.
“(Epic Homes) tweaked about 30% of my original design because I had designed my home for flat land initially. Mine turned out to be sloping land.”
Last September, over the course of three weekends, Atiqah, along with a group of 20 to 30 people – comprising Epic Homes volunteers, plus her family members and friends – brought her design to life.
At 520 sq ft (48.3 sq m), Atiqah’s house comprises an open floor living room and kitchen, a bathroom and a verandah on the ground floor. The upper level is a spacious loft for her bed and work desk. The staircase leading up to the loft doubles up as a wardrobe.
The house structure has been completed but Atiqah wants to take her time to furnish and equip it before she moves in permanently, which she estimates will take five years.
She plans to make each piece of furniture herself. On top of that, the eco-conscious youth is looking for ways to make her home self-sustainable, so she is installing solar panels to power her home, a rainwater collection tank for running water, and a composting toilet to recycle human waste.
“I’m against the disposable culture. For instance, you don’t have to do anything because money can do it for you. You don’t have to learn how to do plumbing, you don’t have to learn how to sew or how to fix your phone because you can pay somebody to do it for you, or you can just throw it away. And that bothers me. It’s a principle that I don’t agree with.”
The overall cost of realising Atiqah’s dream so far is RM200,000. But the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into the project probably cost even more.
Atiqah says she doesn’t mind. “I want to have a relationship with my house. I want a house that would grow with me, a house that I know very intimately about.”