Designing commercial spaces isn’t at the core of what Malaysian home decorator The Makeover Guys (TMOG) does, but you’d hardly be able to tell walking through their new 10,000 sq ft space.
Comprising four units in Kota Damansara’s Emhub commerce hub and warehouse, The Makeover Guys’ new office is aptly dubbed an “experience centre”, giving visitors an in-depth look at what their dream home could be like.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the space is your usual showroom, though. Other than The Makeover Guys’ office—which is brimmed with great design elements—perhaps more interestingly, the space also features a full-fledged coffee shop by RaRa Coffee.
Mixing business and pleasure
With a double-volume ceiling and big windows for ample natural light, RaRa Coffee’s space within The Makeover Guys’ office weaves a beautiful design story in its own right.
Speaking with CEO Gavin Liew about the incorporation of this café, he revealed that it was actually something that happened in the ninth hour. The construction of the entire space took around nine months, and it was in month seven that the TMOG team decided on RaRa Coffee’s involvement.
Yet, with the seamless space planning and layout, you wouldn’t have guessed it.
Warm wooden tones contrast against cool metal to produce a communal zone that feels trendy and modern but perfectly cosy.
Although trees with sparse foliage hardly sounds appealing, these minimalistic plants work wonderfully in this context, playing into the voided ceiling to give a sense of height without making it feel too crowded or top-heavy.
Elevating productivity, fostering connections
Moving into Emhub, the team was essentially given a blank canvas to design… well, everything. But being The Makeover Guys, this should be no big problem, right?
In actuality, though, with so many creative minds in the mix, there may be clashing ideas and tall orders.
“There were multiple iterations, because we have so many designers in the office, it’s hard to get one thing that all of us like,” Gavin shared. “But all of us are very happy with what we do have now.”
Through conversations with the team, Gavin realised that it all came down to creating an office that is inspiring and flexible, with lots of transformative spaces to suit all demands.
While there are plenty of hotdesking options to follow the team members a change of scenery, there’s also more conventional fixed seating. Almost every little pocket of the fixed office zones has sliding doors and shutters to carve out a meeting space.
Without these modular solutions, the space would simply be filled up with all kinds of meeting rooms, leaving little real estate for much else. Now, every department no longer needs to book a meeting room, but rather, can host any discussions within their nook.
Another core mission underpinning the design story is Gavin’s pursuit to encourage collaboration.
He shared with us, “I believe that in collaboration, sometimes the best ideas don’t come in a studio, when it’s very formal. The best ideas come when you’re having coffee, in the pantry, or when you walk by and say hi.”
Thus, the flow was engineered to have three main “highways”, which are zones that team members are “forced” to walk through.
Designers are introverts by nature, Gavin mused, but his system seems to have worked wonders. Just a handful of months into the new office, and the CEO has already seen massive changes in his team’s behaviour. Departments who don’t talk to each other now hang out in the cafes. That, the CEO deemed, is a big win.
Offering modularity at its core
It’s not just the office that’s modular, though. The showroom, too, is designed in a way to allow for convenient refreshes and updates depending on ever-changing themes.
The first theme is all about materials. “Embrace materials in its true form” was the mission, and dare I say, they succeeded. From tiles to wood, metal to quartz, it was fascinating to see how materials so different in texture and feel could combine to tell a coherent design narrative.
As for the structure of this experience centre, we start with a living room setup, which then flows into a kitchen and dining area, then a bedroom, before finally arriving at a room that focuses on creating beautiful interiors without using any fixed furniture.
Gavin also highlighted many key furniture pieces to us, many of which were designed in collaboration with their own team and other homegrown businesses. One memorable one is the modular living room sofa designed with Fuku Studio. The Makeover Guys also have their own furniture brand called DUK.
Balancing function and form in The Makeover Guys’ office
“I love beautiful things, but when it comes to spaces, it’s not just aesthetics, we need to think about how it affects behaviours and whether it enables you to pursue your passion,” Gavin mused about his design approach.
If the space you occupy does not actually allow for you to make good on your passions or even inspire you to pursue those passions, it’s not really good design even if it’s beautiful.
But which one should come first, aesthetics or functionality? Is there an order to form and function? As you might expect, the answer is not cut and dry.
Gavin described it as such—for a business owner, ethics is something that should be a given. It shouldn’t necessarily be something you strive for, because it’s the baseline of their conduct.
Likewise, aesthetic is a given. “But functionality is something that you need to put more thought into.”
As to which one comes first, Gavin believes that you constantly have to juggle between the two. But as one of the signages in the centre says, things go “from chaos to canvas”. The creative process is oftentimes messy and chaotic. But designers must then be tasked to organise that chaos, and sort them into functional and practical concepts.
As much as design matters, at the end of the day, The Makeover Guys isn’t there to create the most luxe and innovative design concepts. They’re not really there to reinvent the wheel. They’re there to make the wheel accessible.
“I think we need to push boundaries for sure, but it cannot be just on the design aspect, because we’re here to serve a purpose, which is to enable people to enjoy better homes.”
What separates a good designer from a great designer, Gavin believes, is being able to work with very limited resources. Talented people can do a great job with a huge sum of money, but not many can do it with a small budget.
The Makeover Guys’ new experience centre went over their initial budget—it doubled, in fact, thanks to Gavin’s adoption of the phrase “might as well”. But it’s so that customers who go there to experience the space can fulfil their dreams within their own means; and that, is its purpose.
Learn more about The Makeover Guys here.
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