Pride

Me and the mister are both architects (though, I have to admit that he's a better architect than I am), and being the complete opposite of each other, naturally, we have 2 completely different ideas of what constitutes a beautiful architecture.

However, being together for so long, my rigidly minimalist-calatrava influenced design, and his sporadic never-influenced-by-anyone design, eventually begin influencing each other,  and at the end of the line, our idea of what is architecturally beautiful, merged to become one. At last! something that we agree on! lol

We had been blessed with the opportunity to create a something together from scratch, and combining both our strength in architecture, which, again, differs greatly from each other (he's a technical genius, while I'm rather good at the "make it pretty" part), we managed to come up with a building.

It really is like having a baby together. The outcome of the final building truly is the combination of our architectural DNA's. In that building I saw traces of my architectural style in the details and finishes, hints of his practicality in the layout, and many other imprints of our architectural ways that I can't exactly pin point. Of course we have had to deal with many constraints, including spatial and financial, and under different circumstances, some things we would definitely have done differently, but looking at the building I can say with much pride on my part, that "it's ours.

Behold, ladies and gentlemen, our first [brain]child.

I had the opportunity to visit Bali so many times, and at some point, had the chance to visit it together with the mister (we were both enchanted by the exotic tropical architecture of Bali), so we tried incorporating everything we know about Balinese architecture, at least we tried to capture the ambience of Balinese design.

Oh, by the way, it's his family's restaurant in Kota Kinabalu, called the Bali-Bali Gardens. It's still very very new (as you may be able to tell from the random patches of grass on the ground), and the restaurant serves local as well as Balinese cuisine. 

I had a little hand in helping set up the ambience of the restaurant too. Although they usually play jazz music at night (they have live bands playing too), I chose the balinese music they play at night. From what I've heard, it's super effective in transporting you straight to Bali. ;) I hope to influence what they serve soon too! After all, who knows Indonesian food better than an Indonesian herself right? hehehe.

So anyway, if you're nearby, do drop by. Word is, they serve really good food. :)

Till then!

xx

p.s: Incidentally, dah cakap pasal DNA's haruslah curious how our babies are going to look like, so I gatal went to morphting.com to see how they'd turn out. And it's pretty impressive how uncannily they resemble us both hahaha. Look!