INTERIORDesigner

EXCLUSIVEINTERVIEWwith

AspiringDesigners

FooFatt Chuen

Advice for

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CONTE N T S

Ng Yeen Mun | Muhammad Faidh | Tengku Syakira | Low Wing Chun | Pau Jin WeiGroup members:

Mr. Foo in his office.

The team and Mr. Foo.

Meet Mr. FooCompany HistoryVision & HistoryMemorable ProjectsProjectsHis RolesWords Of WisdomMeet The Team

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AXIS IDENTITY

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The CEO of

Mr. Foo Fatt Chuen

Trained as an architect, Foo Fatt Chuen (popularly known as Fudge) was previously with Interior Space and GMW Part-nership in London; the Design Director for Interiors at BEP Akitek; and Managing Director of Urbanworks Sdn Bhd until he started Axis Network in 1991.

Under his leadership, Axis Net-work Design Consultants Sdn Bhd has won numerous nation-al and international awards including The Asia Pacific Design Awards 1998 for Hospi-tality Design, the prestigious Enterprise 50 Award 1999 organised by Andersen Con-sulting and SMIDEC, the MSID Award for Design Excellence 1998, plus several awards for design excellence from the Ma-laysian Institute of Interior Designers.

ADVICE FOR

Asp�ingDesign�s

“Keep y�r passi�b�ning as it might get t�gh with�t it.”

“Don’t build objects,build something thatgives back to society.”

“Put your case forward,it’s your dignity”

History

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Company

“Our first office was a conference room”

Axis Identity Group started out over a quarter century ago when three brilliant minds who think alike decided to band together and form a company. In the beginning of the glorious decade, 1990’s, Axis Identity Group was born, raised and nurtured by these individuals. Later on, this company would grow to be one of the most popular companies in the metropolis that is Kuala Lumpur.

The trio encountered multiple problems in the beginning and the most devastating of them all was their limited modal. They were held out in a tiny conference room. This confer-ence room acted out as their base of command , their office. Further down the line, they moved to a building opposite Lot10 when their members have inflated to about 15 employees.

They hatched that decision as the conference room can no longer accommodate a hefty sum of people. As their members fluctuated to a size of 30 had working

employees, they moved their headquarters to WISMA Central, a building that is situated at the heart of Kuala Lumpur, nearby the Famous Petronas Twin Towers. Further down the modern era, they relocated to Selangor Dredging, which is situated next to a famous local bed boarding place, Maya Hotel and Public Bank . The company is still hold up in this building till this day.

ROLE CHANGES

Over the course of his career, Mr Foo’s role has changed so much that his roles has rotated to an almost one hundred and eighty degrees. However, one thing is certain , despite the harsh winds of time, Mr. Foo will always have one static role, and that is to deal with clients from extreme spectrums ranging from young to old, and polite to rude. However, most of his other duties has changed dra-matically over the ages. For instance, back in the day, MrFoo had to do plenty of designing on his projects whilst now, all he does is just oversee the prog-ress of his employees and act as a supervisor. Apart from that,Mr. Foo also has to ensure

the quality of his projects. He requires his projects to be the very best like no other project ever was. Not only that, he also needs to fulfill a certain quota handed up to him on all of his projects ensuring their balances. One of the most important quota to fulfill is the green building quota which requires a building to have a certain per-centage of greenery for it to be approved.

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VISION & AWARDS

Axis Identity Group’s marvelous vision is to be acknowledged as a leading global Strategic Identity Solutions (SIS) provider. Even though this vision is nigh impossible to achieve, the company is affirmative in their capability to achieve it.

Mr. Foo showing us the many awards on display in their headquarters

This is further proven by the countless numbers of awards that they have achieved, such as the winner of the Malaysian Interior Design Awards 2010 for Design Excellence, a silver award for Asia Pacific Interior Design Awards 2009 and an Honorary Mention for Malay-sian Interior Design Awards 2010 for Design Excellence.

pr�ects

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MEMORABLEpr�ect

L ike many interior designers before and after him, MrFoo has completed plenty of memorable projects in this career line. Out of the many , a couple singled out as memorable projects. One of them is the magnificent Palace of Justice, which acts as a jewel in the city where our Prime Minister Resides, Putrajaya. This particular project stands out from the others as it had a very strict deadline. This grandeur project was estimated to have a 5 year window but was given a small three years to finish.

This lead everyone on the team contribute their part to the proj-ect hastily . Furthermore , the Palace of Justice Is the biggest presentation he had yet, with over an astonishing one thousand people acting as the audience. He also had to convey a courtesy presentation to 36 honorable judges. Not only that, Mr Foo had also presented to the respected Prime Minister himself at that time, Tun Dr Mahatir Muhammad. Ultimately , MrFoo had a fan-tastic time working on the project and It will be forever embed-ded into his deepest memories.

EARLIEST

LATEST

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Back before Mr.Foo became one of the founding fathers of the Axis Iden-tity Groups, Mr Foo had a job as an assistant architect. Like many others who held that position , he worked on his very first project helping out a senior architect. His initial project which happened to be in the United Kingdom ( U.K) was a commercial building. Unlike our beautiful country, Malaysia, U.K has a different set of customs. As MrFoo was not a native citizen of the U.K, they have placed an extremely strict guideline on the proj-ect for him to follow. For instance, one of the very guidelines was to design the building based on the local culture whilst maintaining a modern

ambience to it. Furthermore, the build-ings have to respect the local heritage which means Mr. Foo couldn’t design a modern building from the get go. As the project turned out to be a success, this helped secure Mr. Foo’s footing in the construction industry. It was from that moment that he knew, that there will be a bright future await-ing him.

Later on, after Mr. Foo had established himself as one of the founders of Axis Identity Group, he begun working on his own projects. One of the projects that garnered him fame was the Marble 8 project. Marble 8 is an extravagant steak house situated at the beating heart of the living metropolis, Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. Marble 8 has a stunning of the Petronas Twin Tower main dining area. On this particular project , Mr. Foo encountered a slight problem : his given budget. As Mr. Foo’s client wanted to squeeze the most out of his incoming profits, he handed Mr. Foo a rather mediocre budget to work with.

Being the top, of his line Mr. Foo

only wanted the very best fo his beloved clients. Hence, Mr. Foo had

concocted a mind-blowing design for the steak house. As an example, he had used tiles which imitate wood and placed it on the floor boards of the restaurant to give off a woody ambience. He also planted a preserved tree at the epicenter of the floor board . To liven the environment, Mr. Foo designed a small section of the steak house to accom-modate a showroom of sorts, where the chefs would carry out some of the preparation of the custom-er’s food before their very eyes . As the quality of the beef is Marble 8, the steak house took its name from it. Mr. Foo occasionally visits this venue till this day .