At Kimpton Naluria KL, Hassell Studio turns bark, brass, and rainforest drama into urban luxury

Stage magic succeeds through misdirection. The audience watches the hand that moves, while the real work happens somewhere less conspicuous: inside the mechanism, beneath the table, and behind the curtain. 

Interior design often operates by the same principle. The most persuasive spaces rarely declare their ideas at every turn; they allow materials, light, and movement to perform the argument before anyone feels compelled to explain it.

Kimpton Naluria Kuala Lumpur arrives at Tun Razak Exchange with a conspicuous challenge. How does a 26-storey, 466-room hotel inside the capital’s emphatically commercial new district evoke the Malaysian rainforest without becoming an expensive greenhouse or, worse, a corporate approximation of one? 

Design firm Hassell’s answer begins with abstraction. Rather than reproducing nature literally, the studio treats the forest as a system of textures, cycles, and sensory conditions.

Nature, translated

The hotel calls its design narrative “Botanics Beyond Aesthetics”, although its more revealing phrase may be “Parklands: Echoes of the Forest”. Clay finishes, soft woods, terrazzo, deep greens, and dappled illumination create the material foundation, but the project gains greater coherence through recurring ideas of growth, erosion, entanglement, and regeneration.

In the arrival lobby, handmade cement reliefs meet welded rebar shaped into flowing, vine-like formations. Woven stainless steel and oxidised metal evoke bark and roots, establishing a productive tension between organic imagery and industrial fabrication. Elsewhere, golden forms unfold like tropical petals, their curved surfaces capturing light and changing as guests approach. Nature becomes less a decorative theme than a method for manipulating perception.

That observation matters. Hotels frequently import greenery as visual reassurance, particularly inside dense urban developments. Kimpton Naluria instead asks whether architecture can suggest the forest through rhythm, shadow, and material behaviour. 

The lift interiors, for instance, use repeated fan-shaped reliefs that catch artificial light like overlapping lily pads, while corridor artworks resemble mineral strata and agate formations. Even circulation spaces participate in the narrative rather than serving as neutral passages between revenue-generating rooms.

A hotel of changing habitats

Elsewhere, the public spaces move through different interpretations of the landscape. Tuai + Till, the third-floor dining venue, draws upon cultivation and harvest. Suspended glass elements resemble rainfall collecting on leaves, while folded forms and woven rattan reference farming cycles and traditional equipment. 

A Peranakan wall offers a sharper intervention: Nyonya vessels have been sandblasted to erode their familiar glazed surfaces, exposing white porcelain beneath and shifting domestic objects towards something closer to archaeological or industrial artefacts.

Higher up, the forest gives way to theatre. Sabato’s on Level 25 trades botanical restraint for the graphic energy of Italian Futurism, fragmented still lifes, and distorted gold frames. The retro Italian-American restaurant channels the conviviality of the 1970s red-sauce joint, while Four Siblings above it derives its palette and motifs from the Malay spice quartet, ‘empat sekawan’ of cinnamon, clove, star anise, and cardamom. 

These departures prevent the central concept from becoming oppressively uniform. A forest, after all, contains several atmospheres.

The guestrooms lower the volume. Timber, terrazzo, brushed brass, and muted abstractions create quieter spaces, while artworks refer obliquely to tropical fruit, foliage, geological layers, and the spotted surface of the Rafflesia. The references rarely demand recognition. They function as visual pauses rather than explanatory plaques.

The hotel also embeds environmental considerations within its operating systems. Rooms automatically adjust lighting and temperature according to occupancy, motion sensors activate low-level illumination beside the bed, and treated basin water returns as greywater for toilet flushing. Such measures carry greater architectural consequence than another wall of ornamental leaves.

Ultimately, Kimpton Naluria works best when it trusts suggestion. Its rainforest does not grow indoors. It survives instead as texture, shadow, patina, and pattern: a landscape dismantled, reassembled, and hidden in plain sight.