This article first appeared in City & Country, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on April 4, 2022 - April 10, 2022

Built in the 1930s, the former Lee Rubber Building in downtown Kuala Lumpur will reopen its doors this July as boutique hotel Else Kuala Lumpur. The hotel will be the maiden establishment of Else, the latest hospitality brand founded by Justin Chen, deputy CEO of Singapore-based investment holding company Arcc Holdings Pte Ltd, and Javier Perez, F&B entrepreneur and founder of the Kilo and Grain Traders brands.

The property, whose site was once part of philanthropist and Chinese Kapitan Yap Kwan Seng’s estate, was designed by Booty Edwards & Partners (now known as BEP Akitek Sdn Bhd). It was the home of Popular bookstore before being put up for sale by the Lee Rubber Group in September 2015.

The building was sold in January 2016 for RM29 million to its current owner GF Land Sdn Bhd, a Johor-registered company solely owned by Singapore-based Hillington Pte Ltd, of which Chen is a director.

With a land area of 10,637 sq ft, total built-up area of 46,607 sq ft and net lettable area of 38,126 sq ft, the former headquarters of the Lee Rubber Group is one of the few pre-war buildings preserved under the National Heritage Act as Category 2, which requires its entire façade to be maintained.

In an exclusive interview, Chen tells City & Country that he was looking around in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown pocket before coming upon the Lee Rubber Building. “It stood out to us because it is such a prominent building, but in some ways over the years it has been overshadowed by a lot of the new construction around it.

“It was only later during our research into its background that we discovered it used to be one of the tallest buildings in KL, which is truly amazing. We felt that so much could be done with that, given its location right at the mouth of Petaling Street and so close to other access points in the area,” he says in a Zoom call.

To Chen, who trained as an architect, conservation buildings can be a great canvas for stories of the past alongside ideas for the future.

“I’ve always been in the arena of creative spaces. In Singapore, we (Arcc Holdings) have been making investments in conservation shophouses and such kinds of property because I think these spaces help to tell a story about the city and the culture that they were constructed in.

“I also think they provide a great canvas to really inject new stories, new concepts, and so a conservation building has always been appealing for us both from an aesthetic standpoint as well as something that helps bring a sense of connection to the local market,” he says.

Chen notes the move towards revitalisation projects. “Looking at many other cities, we recognise that there is a tendency to revitalise old city cores, the old towns. For KL, I think Chinatown represents that location — right by the Klang River, where KL really started, and so I think there couldn’t be a better place to tell a story about KL and what makes it great.”

Located at 145, Jalan Tun H S Lee, the new Else Kuala Lumpur will have 49 rooms and suites, a 25m plunge pool, floating meditation pods, a drawing room and library, a state-of-the-art gym and workout studio, a boardroom as well as two new-to-market F&B projects — The Raw Kitchen Hall and The Yellow Fin Horse.

A hospitality brand at heart, Else did not start as a hotel but an ethos. “It started off with the thought of what really brings us together as travellers, and in our minds, the hotel represents that,” says Chen.

“It was the idea about the modern, global citizen that I guess Perez and myself represent since we’ve lived our lives and have done business in many different countries, something very emblematic of a lot of the people in the Southeast Asian region where many don’t just have business in one localised place and many are often looking across whether for education, travel, lifestyle … it’s the effects of globalisation.” 

The 39-year-old has spent over a decade in real estate development and hospitality, and currently also leads Arcc Spaces, a collection of shared workspace brands in over 20 locations across Asia, including Kuala Lumpur, as well as a private members club called The City Society in Beijing. The Canadian national who currently resides in Shanghai spent six years of his childhood in Mali, Africa, where his family has continued to operate a factory inherited from his grandfather.

Perez, 43, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico, has had multiple stints in the service industry, which culminated in the pursuit of a hospitality degree in Switzerland before he set off for Southeast Asia where he has nurtured the Kilo and Grain Traders F&B brands and now Else, his latest project.

“We both have had very different journeys in our hospitality experience. Perez has worked in hotels in the past but, of course, his more recent experience has been very much grounded in F&B and so he brings a lot of his F&B experience to this project.

“I firstly trained as an architect and so my approach to space or hospitality really has been from the experience standpoint — how do we want to make people feel in a space? And being involved in shared workspaces, even though you might call it commercial real estate, I have only ever thought of it as hospitality because it is still very much about service,” says Chen.

“At the heart of it, we understand that people’s lives and their circles of activity these days are increasingly converging — whether it’s in the way that they work, live or play. So it was a natural kind of aspiration for Perez and myself to enter into a full-fledged hospitality [project].” 

While the Else hotel is the brand’s current expression, the founders envision the brand expanding in time. “Else goes beyond a hotel product. I would represent it more as a hospitality brand. We hope to use this as a starting point to build a culture of hospitality and wellness, as well as an exchange of ideas and maybe have that translated into different types of projects in the future,” Chen says.

Focusing on the work-leisure market, Else Kuala Lumpur aims to be a home away from home for its guests. “We’ve always wanted the hotel to be rather intimate in scale, in the sense that people could feel welcomed into a home. We want it to give you the ability to feel like you can touch down and immediately feel like you’re connected to the pulse of KL and at the same time be able to find your own peace and escape within the property.

“And as you wander through the property, there will be a lot of pockets for guests to pause, sit down, read a book, or respond to an object. We’ve carved out different pockets within the property for people to explore. It’s not just about the room experience. Rather, the entire property will be one where people can enjoy and find moments to discover, pause and reflect,” he relates.

“Speaking from my own experience as a business traveller, we’re always in this mode of hyperactivity and compressed for time. At the same time, we wish to have this moment of rest. So on top of just one requirement, we want to offer these multiple modes of being at the property.”

Layered on top of this are the two F&B offerings the duo is bringing to town. “They are not necessarily your typical full-service, all-day dining that just cater for guests, but we see them as independent restaurants in the KL market and we aspire for these projects to be places for both locals and travellers to visit,” says Chen.

The Raw Kitchen Hall on the ground floor will serve Asian-Mediterranean cuisine. He describes this restaurant, which has a casual-chic setting, as the ideal place for larger groups to mingle, have fun and enjoy a casual meal together. 

Wood-fire restaurant The Yellow Fin Horse, meanwhile, is located on the fourth floor or podium level. “This offering is a slightly more sophisticated fine casual restaurant where we really want to pay our respects to what makes cuisine in Malaysia great. There will be a big focus on seasonal ingredients and local farm-to-table produce, and it will feature the return to a more authentic way of cooking, by fire. It will offer a bit more of a culinary experience for people,” he says.

“Having said that, we approach this project with an attitude of humility,” Chen remarks. “We don’t believe we can reinvent hospitality by ourselves. To be fair, there’s been so much great stuff that’s happened in hospitality throughout the years, so we take a lot of pages from our seniors or forefathers in hospitality in terms of what hospitality service could look like and what it could mean.”

Else Kuala Lumpur will be led by general manager Jaimy van den Berg, who started his hospitality career in the Netherlands before working in Asia including in Kathmandu, Nepal, and Hanoi and Da Nang, Vietnam. “Jaimy comes with a good deal of experience in terms of hospitality operations and has really been at the core of our project. He has stayed with us even throughout the pandemic, so this is really his project as well.”

Reservations for Else Kuala Lumpur opens this month for stays in July, at RM560 to RM1,400 nightly.

Property consultancy Knight Frank Malaysia’s executive director of capital markets, James Buckley, is positive on additions such as Else Kuala Lumpur to the Chinatown market. “Kuala Lumpur has several buildings with architecturally intriguing features that are rich in history and character, and it is great to see when these buildings have been repurposed. Travellers not only want consistency and reliability but also prefer authenticity that comes from staying in a lovingly restored old building, which we anticipate will be offered by Else.”

He observes that Chinatown currently does not have anything similar available and is largely dominated by budget hotels. “The whole area is undergoing tremendous gentrification, with the nearby PNB118 development being the catalyst. I think the outlook in the medium to long term is very positive.

“Coupled with the reopening of the Malaysian borders [this month], we expect international arrivals to ramp up and that there will be a corresponding uplift in trading for hotels, particularly those that are affordable and provide excellent service and good design,” he adds.

Else has been working closely with local design consultancy firm Studio Bikin for this hospitality project, with Faizah Architect as the architect of record.

“When we were looking for designers for this project, we were very intentional about finding the right local designers because we wanted someone who could communicate that Malaysian perspective and understand the context of the project,” says Chen, who first met the architects and founders of Studio Bikin, Farah Azizan and Adela Askandar, when he led the operations for co-working brand The Co. in Malaysia.

“We’ve had past opportunities to try and work together but this project became a great point of collaboration for us,” he adds.

The design brief was clear. “We knew we couldn’t preserve everything we wanted inside the existing shell of the building and that it did need quite a bit of TLC, but we were clear from the start that we really wanted the project to represent the ethos of Else, which has always been about the idea of contrast.

“We believe that by contrasting things, we can really accentuate the different characteristics, kind of like how light and shadow accentuate each other. So we wanted the idea of duality to be translated into the property and to look at how we can take a modern approach to this conservation building. We didn’t want to conserve it for the sake of conserving it; we want it to speak to the now,” says Chen.

It appears the stars have aligned as Studio Bikin is experienced in working with existing or historical buildings. “And it always stems with this idea of duality and contrast that exists within us as human beings. It is also about what to preserve and what to inject new, what to omit and what to add, as well as the contrast between past and present. And we essentially started from there,” says Farah.

“Then of course there are other aspects of responding to its context, which is this really great, dynamic site in Chinatown. It is like being in the cultural crux of a cultural rehabilitation. You’ve got REX KL and this amazing array of exciting F&B outlets and bars all nestled in between uncles selling salted fish, flower shops and jewellery wholesalers that have been there for the past 50 years or so. So there is this very interesting contextual dynamic between the old and new businesses, and all these informed us how to approach the building.” 

One of the first things the designers looked at was to bring natural light into the building. “The Lee Rubber Building did have a certain energy and character to it, as it is quite a solid-looking building. So we wanted to create some lightness,” Adela explains.

A key design move was to create a series of atriums that would appear to overlap with one another. “This brings some natural light and ventilation into the space and corridors where the rooms are at,” Farah says.

From the original four-storey structure — ground to third floor — the designers have added two additional floors — the fifth and sixth – atop the podium or fourth floor.

“We interpreted the structure in a sense that the higher you go, the lighter you become and so we used a combination of steel and concrete to lighten the load on the building as the existing structure is a combination of masonry and concrete,” she elaborates.

Adela notes that the central cut-outs were important to allow the visual connection between the floors. “This goes back to what Chen was saying about encouraging or nurturing self-connectivity and connectedness between the guests.

“The original office building had straightforward [floor] slabs so you’ll have no sense of what’s happening on the other floors. Whereas now, you have this vantage point where you can see right up to the top floors or look back down from the top,” she says.

Guests can now look upwards towards the “new” or alternatively be at the new built and gaze downwards towards the past, Farah remarks. “There’s a constant interplay between new and old, creating this really nice dynamic as you traverse the different spaces in the building.”

Another interesting aspect about the property is that it gives a vantage point of downtown Kuala Lumpur’s cityscape on the podium level. “As the Lee Rubber Building is a listed building, the two new floors had to be set back. This convergence point [between the new and old built] on the podium level offers a fantastic view of the KL skyline. Guests can look out onto the downtown KL horizon, kind of like looking at layers of architectural history,” Adela enthuses.

“That was what struck us most when we got on the roof when we first visited the site,” Farah interjects. “Usually, people’s appreciation of the city is either from a bird’s eye view on some skyscraper or from the street level. But from the fourth floor, you have this in-between vantage point, which is quite rare. It’s like you’re right in the thick of everything, but elevated. It’s a very interesting feeling because it can be quite confrontational but in an interesting way. This is actually what we like most about the building, which not many people had access to before this.”

Meanwhile, the designers addressed the challenges of working with existing buildings. “Dealing with existing buildings is very tricky because there were some interesting features and as much as we wanted to conserve them, there is always a balancing act between what to conserve and what to let go, for structural reasons. There was always this back-and-forth dialogue between us and the structural engineers and the clients during the process. But what is most important is that I think we’ve managed to get there in the end,” says Farah.

The building’s façade, including the Lee Rubber Building name etched on it, has been kept intact. It’s a nod to the past and the people who built it, as Chen says.

“While there were features that were a clear intervention by way of design, there was a conscious attempt to retain certain existing characteristics of the building, and it would be nice for guests to figure the building out themselves. We want to leave some element of surprise for their interpretation. To some degree, it’s almost a house of curiosity,” Farah quips.

“Like how Chen said it, dealing with such a majestic building is a huge lesson in humility. There were a lot of issues that presented themselves, but our approach was to not overwhelm the building and to basically meet it eye-to-eye with where [it] is now, with a nod to what it was and what it stood for when it was first built.”

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