Saujana Villa

This was some time in 1995. We assembled an elephant that functioned as a slider. The surface of the tusk was made of sea shells; the eyes, of glass marbles; the eye rushes, of untwisted nylon rope and the rest, of concrete. The vein on the ear was well done, applause to the workers! Maybe a children's play equipment is quite standard and rather boring nowadays. The elephant still exists today in the condominium in Subang.

Matsushita Sports Centre, Shah Alam

One of our earliest projects assigned by Mr.Kitayama of Keikan Sekkei, Singapore for Kajima Corporation. It's the annual venue of "Bon Odori" festival organized by the Japan Club of Kuala Lumpur as the scenery shown in the picture collecting 35,000 participants every July. The dynamics of this kind of work was to layout 400m running track and other sport courts, 50m swimming pool, car parking and other landscape features to fit within the site boundary, especially still in the era Auto CAD was not used.

Landscape Characteristic Plan for Kuantan Town

While doing some jobs in Kuantan, East coast of Peninsula Malaysia, such as Sukma Sport Complex, Kuantan Tembeling Resort and Kuantan Parade, we tried to promote more works in Kuantan and managed to get this prestigious project from the town counsel. Kashino enjoyed repeated visits to Kuantan and studied every corner of the town with his bicycle obtained locally, and we finally concluded a practical method of turning the town beautiful. It was unfortunate of Aroma Tropics not a Bumi company that day, so we lost the following advanced landscape master planning package.

Cameron Towers, Gasing Heights, Petaling Jaya

Cameron Towers was the last phase of Gasing Heights development in which Aroma Tropics was called by our dear client; Mr.Adrian Tan. We accepted his offer with a condition if we could have freedom of changing their existing concept; "Polynesian". To us, the existing Gasing Hill was beautiful and should not be destroyed, so we drew Gasing Hill's greenery towards the development by introducing forest trees on the hill at the right side of the pool in this picture and continued further to the development's landscape garden. Also extended palm clusters from the garden with ornamental species to the hill with wild species. Today, the condominium and the nature have completely merged together.

Damai Terrace, Jalan Murni, Kuala Lumpur

Somewhere at the back of Empire Tower along Jalan Tun Razak near Jalan Ampang junction, IGB developed very nice town house that might be called "Anjung Damai". Just to conserve the existing big Rain Tree in the middle of the swimming pool site, we designed a timber terrace around the pool and aligned an organic shape water line. Being fed up with a normal overflow system, we invented our original pool edge.

Japanese garden at SOGO, Kuala Lumpur

There is a Japanese garden at the back entrance to SOGO (not sure if there still be). We refused to mock a Japanese garden here as required by the client (Taisei Corporation), and always came up with design proposals of a modern Japanese style garden. The client lost words with our attitude and asked their office in Japan to send a pure Japanese garden proposal that was passed to us. It was embarrassing to work on other designer's work but we did as the sketch was by Mr.Suzuki Shodo; one of the most famous masters of Japanese garden. We materialized his garden with our Aroma essense with our sincere respect to him.

Pangkor Island Beach Resort

Some times we prefer organic shapes, but other times geometrical, and this was the latter. Because the other existing pool was of curve lines, we designed this new pool at the extended wing of the hotel with serious adult attitudes, but still with fun spirits. Stating monthly site meetings as regular island holiday work, we enjoyed this off shore job.

Damansara Villa

Accessible from Jalan Bukit Ledang, a reasonably luxury condominium. We were tired of seeing waterfalls with artificial rocks for this kind of development else where those days, so tried a transparent waterfall with simple concrete structure. When the fall stops, you still enjoy the aligned bollards on the calm water surface. Mohd Noor was mainly in charge of the design and site supervision.

A Japanese garden

You feel sad to see your garden gone, and this is one of them. It was a Japanese restaurant called "Keyaki" in Glenmarie, then Pan Pacific Hotel. Now changed to "Furin" of Holiday Inn, we are still proud of our lost product of a pure Japanese touch in Malaysia with all local materials and people.

MNI Twins, Kuala Lumpur

It was located around KLCC without KLCC yet, and we were not aware of the prestige of the area in the city. Since our scope of work was very limited, we tried hard to make this simple work better e.g.negotiated with the architect to split a centre pillar to two pillars to allow the fountain to look grand. The granite cobbles were one of our specialities those days for good water splash and a lot of people appreciate till today.

Sri York, Penang

Kashino liked Penang very much and once tried to organized some jobs at once. This was one of it and did quite well. He enjoyed staying in Penang Club with its swimming pool and beer. But it was difficult doing one job there, and other projects were slow enough to kick us out of the island.
We want to go there again.

SOGO, Kuala Lumpur

Correctly, Pernas-SOGO Departmental Store
Sadly, SOGO does not exist in Japan any more, but it was the newest Japanese outlet in those days. Kashino 'begged' the client for a design competition and managed to win.
'SOGO' in Japanese means 'Ten together' as the town SOGO originated is a traffic node to/from various directions. So we conceptualized the landscape design with ten distinctive palms to hope the store to thrive with 'ten's of thousand of customers.

Children's world, Singapore Zoo ...Pool

Who decides a pool to be square or circle?
There are things to think, ...the form, the edge, the depth, the colour, the material, the texture, the shape, the form and codition and flow of water, the plants, the type of kids and their mothers...

Children's world, Singapore Zoo ...Net

The very first project of Aroma Tropics in 1990.
Mr. Kitayama of then Zoen Design Pte Ltd was kind enough to give us an opportunity to begin our own practice with this playground design.
We think children are not as stupid as recent playground suppliers' assumption that kids like nothing but simple primary colours on plastic. Children are as sensitive as the nature with various forms, texture, movement and diversity.
The net is by the fabric artist: Ms Horiuchi, Canada.

Glenmarie Golf & Country Club

One of Aroma Tropics's earliest projects (1991-2).
Kashino visited the client's office rather often with not much to discuss with, and in a way 'begged' a job. With not enough money to buy a 4x4, he became a hero on the site with his scrambler motor cycle for pegging locations of trees we proposed.
Eventually, the two courses were well characterized with "Palms" and "Coniferous" trees.