✦ Kuala Lumpur was named a UNESCO Creative City of Design in October 2025, recognising years of heritage conservation, adaptive reuse and public-space development. ✦ Hotels such as Else and The RuMa show how areas like Chinatown and the Golden Triangle are converting historic buildings and heritage into design-led stays. ✦ REXKL, a 1947 cinema turned community and culture hub, and ChoCha Foodstore, in a former 1960s hotel, anchor a wider adaptive-reuse movement across the city’s food and retail scene. ✦ Warisan KL, the national heritage initiative launched by the Malaysian government in April 2025, is also restoring landmarks, alongside grassroots projects like Kebun Kebun Bangsar and the UR-MU museums that are reshaping how the city uses its public and cultural space.
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FOR A LONG TIME, Kuala Lumpur’s identity was tied to its skyline, from the twin-peaked silhouette of the Petronas Towers to the 118-floor ascent of Merdeka Maybank Tower; a metropolis defined by its verticality.
In recent years, however, a slate of creative communities has been reclaiming the city's soul and recontextualising its past to build a more grounded future, a shift underscored by Kuala Lumpur's designation as a UNESCO Creative City of Design in October 2025. The recognition placed KL alongside Berlin, Seoul and Singapore in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, the culmination of years of effort.
New in the old
To experience this transition, one must leave the shadows of the skyscrapers and enter the narrow lanes of Chinatown. The oldest district in the capital, it's fast being reshaped through adaptive reuse, an approach that treats architectural heritage as a scaffold for new ideas.
Photos: Radit Mahindro
Take Else, for example, a boutique hotel housed in the 1930s Art Deco Lee Rubber Building. Its design is a collaboration between founders Justin Chen and Javier Perez and the KL-based Studio Bikin, led by Farah Azizan and Adela Askandar, who began work on the conversion in 2016.
As native Malaysian architects, Farah and Adela brought a geo-cultural sensitivity to the project, working around the building's storied textures, including terrazzo benches still engraved with the Lee Rubber Building's original logo. Here, guests can observe Chinatown's daily rhythms from a saltwater infinity pool set into a brick-lined terrace on the fourth-floor podium.
Rebirth of a landmark
Another example of this movement toward people-first urbanism is Warisan KL, the national heritage initiative launched by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim in April 2025.
Rather than favouring mega-projects, it has set its sights on citizen-first rejuvenation of 10 historic landmarks across the city.
A central focus is the revitalisation of Dataran Merdeka (Merdeka Square). Once a lawn reserved for formal pageantry, it’s being reimagined as a functional civic space. Block 1 of the Sultan Abdul Samad Building – the Moorish-style landmark whose clock tower chimed in independence at midnight on August 31, 1957 – reopened to the public in January 2026, after 11 months of conservation. It now houses the Kuala Lumpur City Gallery. Meanwhile, work continues on the Union Jack flagpole and the Queen Victoria Fountain nearby, which will eventually turn the historical icon into a practical meeting point for people rather than a monument seen only from behind railings.
Photos: Radit Mahindro
The home of mining memories
While Chinatown looks back at its shophouses, the Golden Triangle recalls the industry that built the city: tin. Here, The RuMa Hotel and Residences acts as a "home" (rumah) that tells this story through a contemporary frame.
Designed by British architect Andy Hall of Shanghai-based MQ Studio following six years of research into Malaysia's craft traditions, the experience relies on symbolism rather than typical luxury. Guests enter through “The Birdcage”, a terracotta antechamber referencing the caged canaries once used to detect gas leaks in tin mines, before the space opens into a lobby where a copper-tiled ceiling and a double spiral staircase draw the eye upward.
This is a hotel that ensures that even in the business district, the guest remains connected to the city's roots.
Photos courtesy of The RuMa
Tropical logic and cultural anchors
About 15 mins away on foot is architect and art collector Dr Tan Loke Mun’s first Urban Museum (UR-MU), a space for art, food, design and architecture. Opened in 2022, the concept has since been expanded to a second site called The Toffee on Jalan Raja Chulan as well as a third on Jalan Tun H.S. Lee.
Each museum houses works from Dr Tan’s own collection alongside those of fellow collectors, giving the city cultural anchors that both display art and facilitate public discourse.
Perhaps the most radical design statement in the city, however, is a farm.
In 2013, landscape architect Ng Sek San initiated Kebun Kebun Bangsar, an urban sanctuary carved out of derelict state land. Since then, it has grown into one of KL's most significant community parks, run by volunteers – a living argument for non-monetised space where urban wealth is measured in access to soil and shared civic responsibility. Two further projects, in Kerinchi and Sungai Klang, have followed.
Photos: Radit Mahindro
That same appetite for turning a written-off space into a working part of the city runs through REXKL, on Jalan Sultan. The building first opened in 1947 as one of the country’s earliest cinemas, went up in flames in 1972, was rebuilt as a 1,100-seat single-screen theatre under the Shaw Brothers and later Golden Screen Cinemas, then closed for good in 2002 after a stint as a backpacker hostel ended in another fire. In 2017, architects Shin Tseng and Shin Chang took on the 60,000 sqft shell and turned it into a community and culture hub.
Today, it’s a bookstore, independent food hall, laneway of shaded tables, and a rolling calendar of talks, markets and exhibitions, all inside walls that still carry the cinema’s ash-grey concrete and mosaic-tiled staircases.
A few streets over, down Jalan Petaling, ChoCha Foodstore occupies the former Mah Lian Hotel, a derelict 1960s shoplot that Chang’s design practice, MentahMatter, converted into a restaurant, bar and co-working space – keeping the original coloured tiles and grilles, and building a menu around Malaysian ingredients from Borneo and beyond. And across town, the restaurant and ulam farm OpenHouse Conlay operates within the grounds of a restored 1925 colonial bungalow. Working with Malaysia’s department of national heritage, it has taken on the task of reviving disappearing traditional recipes, sourcing some of its produce through Orang Asli communities and growing the rest in its own ulam garden – proof that the city’s instinct for keeping the old useful isn't confined to concrete and tile.
Photos: Radit Mahindro, ChoCha FoodStore (middle)
The design trail: 8 stops across Kuala Lumpur
Landmark | Neighbourhood | What it is | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
Else Kuala Lumpur | 145 Jalan Tun H.S. Lee, Chinatown | Boutique hotel inside the 1930s Art Deco Lee Rubber Building, designed by Studio Bikin | Opened 2022 |
The RuMa Hotel and Residences | 7 Jalan Kia Peng, Golden Triangle | Luxury hotel with a tin-mining-inspired lobby by Andy Hall of MQ Studio | Opened 2019 |
Sultan Abdul Samad Building | Dataran Merdeka (Merdeka Square) | Moorish-style colonial landmark restored under Warisan KL; now home to the Kuala Lumpur City Gallery | Built 1897; Block 1 reopened January 2026 |
UR-MU (Urban Museum) | Jalan Bedara, Bukit Bintang (plus sites at The Toffee, Jalan Raja Chulan, and Jalan Tun H.S. Lee) | Private contemporary art museums founded by architect Dr Tan Loke Mun | First site opened 2022 |
Kebun Kebun Bangsar | Bangsar | Volunteer-run community farm on reclaimed state land, founded by landscape architect Ng Sek San | Founded 2013 |
REXKL | 80 Jalan Sultan, Chinatown | A 1947 cinema turned bookstore, food hall and cultural hub, led by Shin Tseng and Shin Chang | Reopened 2018 |
ChoCha Foodstore | 156 Jalan Petaling, Chinatown | Modern Malaysian restaurant and co-working space in the former Mah Lian Hotel, designed by Shin Chang/MentahMatter | Opened 2016 |
OpenHouse Conlay | 2 Jalan Stonor, Conlay | Malaysian heritage restaurant on the grounds of Badan Warisan Malaysia’s heritage compound, reviving gazetted national recipes | Current location opened 2024 |
From community spaces to volunteer-run parks and rehabilitated buildings, Kuala Lumpur is now assembling a fresh self-portrait, one restored shophouse and repurposed cinema at a time. And it’s mapping a future that has less to do with height and more to do with how well people can live together and interact on the ground.
