How a Toronto architect designed the home in Crazy Rich Asians
2018.08.31
It’s kind of a crazy story: a stunning house in Kuala Lumpur designed by a Toronto architect is cast as the home of “crazy rich Asians” in a Hollywood movie of the same name.
And the proud family of five who actually live there have a blast when their home became a bit of a madhouse for 13 hours during filming last year.
The Warner Bros. movie, Crazy Rich Asians, is a romantic comedy based on a novel by Kevin Kwan. It opens in Toronto on Wednesday, Aug. 15.
The plot follows Rachel (played by Constance Wu) and her boyfriend Nick (Henry Golding) to Singapore for a friend’s wedding. Nick introduces her to his very wealthy family who have different plans for the dashing young man, considered to be the “Prince Harry of Asia.”
Cut to the silent star of the film: Be-landa House, built on stilts among the treetops on a jungle hillside. Designed by Stephanie Maignan, who moved to Toronto last summer after working in Malaysia for 15 years, the six-bedroom, contemporary oasis belongs to Jan and Ineke Hofstede and their three kids aged 15, 18 and 20.
The Hofstedes, who moved to Malaysia in 1992, asked Maignan to design their home on a 34-degree slope. (Be-landa, Maignan explains, means “Dutch” in the local language.)
“They came to us with this jungle lot they bought which was the most challenging place for us to build on,” says Maignan, who partnered with Amanda Teh to set up their architectural firm, 29 Design, in 2005.
“It took a crazy amount of time,” five years from first draft to completion in 2014, thanks to monsoons, landslides and newly-imposed construction requirements.
The house consists of three pavilions on different levels, linked by a glass-walled bridge and seven staircases necessary for vertical connection because of the slope.
“The engineer called me a crazy architect because of what we were asking,” laughs Maignan, who took her design cues from the Hofstedes’ affinity for the tropics and Southeast Asian lifestyle.
Author: Carola Vyhnak
Source: https://www.thestar.com/life/homes/2018/08/10/how-a-toronto-architecht-designed-the-home-in-crazy-rich-asians.html
