EDI Architects (Essential Design Integrated) is a multi disciplinary and multi award winning practice that explores and examines the concepts of boutique and customized living.
Based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the practice embraces the concepts of tropical living and explores the idea of what’s essential. EDI asks the questions of wants and needs and balances them with a comprehensive and extensive dialogue with users.
A design of house is largely intertwined with the sensibilities and parameters of place. Climate, architecture – international style, vernacular, and everything in between – coupled with labour and materials revolve around local construction norms and techniques, governed by the time-cost-quality trifecta. When emancipated from these, especially in a city like Phnom Penh, the opportunity to adopt a different way of working presents itself. CONTEMPORANEOUS The desire to investigate a job outside Malaysia led to Essential Design Integrated’s (EDI) foray into Cambodia. “It was 2018, around March, when we got involved on the project,” says EDI director Wong Pei San. “We took the initiative to fly to Phnom Penh, and to look at the site. The area was a new suburb, affluent. The client is a Cambodian who has lived mostly abroad and wanted us to explore something modern, something clean, that was different from what’s around.” The city’s suburban homes – reflecting a post-war, post-2000-expansion – are commonly clustered, an eclectic tableau of last-century styles, roofs often tiled or concretised. EDI’s In-Ex-trovert is ostensibly a contemporaneous departure; white walls…
