Fabian Tan

Malaysia

Fabian Tan leads a small team of architects from his Kuala Lumpur HQ, creating innovative home designs with a unique character throughout Malaysia. Founded in 2012, the emerging studio focuses on residential work, but designs in a large variety of scales and typologies, stretching from institutional, commercial and interior projects to art pieces, furniture and installations. Drawing inspiration from ‘the spirituality of the site’, Tan’s designs are elegantly pared down. One of his recent works, Bewboc House (pictured) demonstrates this approach, led by the relationship between light, material, volume and spatial flow. Homes should be a haven of calm, where we can escape our ‘hectic and noise-filled era’, explains the architect. ‘Our approach is one that involves evolution and flexibility; ideas that are formed in the conception of a project and never impose anything on the site. We constantly reassess conventions, resulting in individual variations of concepts meant for a specific context; repetitions of styles are not allowed in our office,’ continues Tan. ‘We are assumed to be minimalist, but really we prefer the term “essentialist”.’