He grew up in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown. Now architect Shin Chang is helping bring it back to life

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From turning a neglected shophouse into ChoCha Foodstore to helping transform the former Rex Cinema into REXKL, the Malaysian architect believes good design should bring people together.

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05 Nov 2026 06:09AM

Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown has become a hip destination, with speakeasies, art galleries and third-wave coffee shops nestled among traditional medical halls and kopitiams. Young people flock to REXKL, home to the maze-like BookXcess bookstore, while Else Kuala Lumpur, a member of Design Hotels, occupies the restored Lee Rubber Building, an Art Deco landmark dating back to 1931.

It was not always this way. Malaysian architect Shin Chang, who grew up in Chinatown, witnessed the neighbourhood’s decline from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. In an interview with CNA Luxury during his visit to Singapore for the Archifest Conference, Chang reflected on his efforts to bring new life to the neighbourhood.

By the 2010s, the neighbourhood had become home to shops selling imitation clothing, massage parlours and stalls selling DVDs and CDs. Budget hotels and bars had also sprung up, according to a 2019 report in The Edge Malaysia.

“When I was young, this place had life. It had food, trade, temples and cinemas. Then people stopped coming. The cinemas closed. Everywhere you looked, it was like the shophouses and empty lots were waiting to rot. It was very quiet. There was almost no culture left. The life had gone out,” Chang recalled.

THE DECLINE OF KUALA LUMPUR’S CHINATOWN 

Rapid urbanisation and economic growth from the late 1980s onwards transformed Kuala Lumpur’s urban and social landscape. As new commercial and retail districts emerged, businesses and residents gradually moved away from the historic city centre. Families also relocated to growing suburbs such as Cheras and Petaling Jaya.

Chang’s family was among those who moved to Cheras as the cost of living in central Kuala Lumpur rose. Years later, after working at boutique architecture firms Seksan Design and Unit One Design, he established Mentahmatter Design with Penny Ng in 2013.

Chang recalled standing along Petaling Street – a major thoroughfare in Chinatown – and looking at “all the emptiness”. It was then that he decided to act. “I decided to play a small part in bringing life back to one little corner of this place where I was raised,” he said.

In 2016, Chang and Ng opened ChoCha Foodstore, a restaurant and bar housed in a 1920s shophouse along Petaling Street. “It took a lot of courage for me to start Chocha Foodstore. Nobody came to that part of town past 6pm. I saw homeless people and drug addicts around,” said Chang. They also established Mentahmatter’s studio in another shophouse nearby.

RAW AMBITIONS

Mentah, meaning “raw” in Malay, encapsulated the studio’s design philosophy. Many of its projects celebrated the natural textures of concrete, brick and metal, while allowing plants to grow freely. The same philosophy extended to ChoCha, which means “teatime” in the Hakka dialect.

ChoCha served simple dishes with local flavours, including cincalok fried chicken seasoned with fermented shrimp paste. The interiors retained the building’s original mosaic floors and decorative metal window grilles. A year and a half later, Ng and Chang opened Botak Liquor upstairs, serving botanical cocktails and spirits.

Neither had any F&B experience, but they had conviction and gusto in abundance. Chang believed opening a restaurant was the easiest way to draw people back to the neighbourhood. “Can you imagine how I started my restaurant? I bought a book online titled How do you start a restaurant? It cost me 30 Ringgit (US$7.40; S$9.40). I still keep the PDF and learn from it. I’m not joking,” he said with a chuckle.

Drawing people back to Chinatown was no easy task. Business was initially slow. “Firstly, we didn’t have experience. Secondly, people had doubt – a lot of doubt. I think nobody thought it could work,” said Chang. But six months later, queues began forming outside ChoCha Foodstore. “I thought I had hit the jackpot,” he recalled.

DESIGNING FOR CULTURE AND LIFE

There was another reason Chang wanted to put down roots in Chinatown. A grassroots movement emerged when landowners and shopkeepers learnt that their properties were at risk of compulsory acquisition to make way for the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) project along Jalan Sultan.

Between 2011 and 2013, landowners, residents and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) protested against the proposed acquisition, fearing the loss of Chinatown’s historic buildings and cultural heritage. A compromise was eventually reached, allowing MRT Corp to construct tunnels beneath the affected properties while landowners retained ownership of their buildings.

The movement helped turn attention towards Chinatown’s architectural heritage and the importance of preserving it. ChoCha Foodstore subsequently showed how an old shophouse could be adapted for contemporary use without losing its original character.

In 2019, Chang and his partners transformed the former Rex Cinema into REXKL, a community hub for arts, culture and events. He described it as “a living machine for the arts, cultural lifestyle, small events, festivals and performances – things that are limited in daily urban life.” The design stayed true to the mentah philosophy, retaining unpainted concrete pillars, brick walls and exposed roof trusses. Plants draped the facade like a green veil.

POSITIVE CITY IMPACT

“A cracked glass is a mark of age. For me, that is not a flaw. It is a memory. Instead of erasing that history, we try to read it and reinterpret it, to bring new life and energy, and slowly reclaim the city piece by piece,” Chang said, explaining his preference for preserving the signs of age in buildings rather than glossing them up. 

REXKL is home to businesses such as artisanal ice cream shop Licky Chan, fermented drinks specialist Fababa and Stellar Coffee, which serves single-origin pour-over coffee. The former 6,000 sq ft cinema hall has also been transformed into a BookXcess bookstore, with shelves of books set against exposed concrete walls.

Like ChoCha Foodstore, REXKL struggled to attract visitors initially. “It was empty for three months. I decided to do something with enough volume to attract people to come. So I started karaoke night. People dressed like hipsters and the auntie who sold nasi lemak next door were sitting together,” Chang recalled.

For Chang, the events at REXKL were simply a means of bringing people together. “These were just reasons for people to come, to meet and to stay. We never saw REXKL as an end to itself. We treated it as a pilot project to prove that a small collective act of care can bring real positive impact to the city. If this can work in one forgotten corner, I believe it can work in many other places,” he said.

FROM DISRUPTIONS TO DISRUPTOR

During our interview, Chang reflected on the experiences that had shaped his outlook over the years. Having grown up in a predominantly Chinese-speaking environment and attended a Chinese-language school, he found himself outside his comfort zone when he moved to Australia to study architecture.

“I couldn’t really speak English even though I had learned a bit of it. When my lecturer asked me to explain more about my presentation, I stood there, nervous and a bit lost,” Chang recalled. Although studying in Australia was initially a culture shock, he found parallels between Melbourne’s multicultural environment and the diversity of his hometown, Kuala Lumpur.

Another formative experience happened in his childhood. “My father was a contractor. During the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, many contractors lost their jobs or were put on tight contracts so in order to survive, they opened hawker stalls or kopitiams,” shared Chang. 

His father opened a kopitiam along Petaling Street, where Chang spent much of his childhood. He has fond memories of the bustling businesses and eateries in the neighbourhood, making its subsequent decline all the more poignant.

CULTURE IS NOT CONFINED TO BUILDINGS

As an architect, Chang was frustrated that he could design buildings but had little control over what happened inside them once they were completed. “I started to think: what can architects do besides consulting? Why don't we just do our own projects? I think the hardware is important but the software is often missing,” he said.

For Chang, culture is not confined to buildings. It also takes shape through the interactions between the people who use them. That was partly why he started ChoCha Foodstore. He is proudest when people “forget about the space or design completely because they are too busy living inside, having fun in the space and enjoying being creative.”

Chang sees his projects in Chinatown as part of a growing cultural ecosystem. His team continues to explore opportunities in the neighbourhood. “Slowly, we may venture into programs like co-living that might help bring life back. There’re almost no residents living in this part of town. We want to bring that back,” he said.

After all, when done well, a project stops being just about building. “It becomes a platform, and the real power of a platform is that it builds a community,” Chang asserted in the closing of his talk. 

Source: CNA/bt