Welcome. This probably doesn’t feel like a designer’s website should feel, and that’s on purpose. I’d rather just talk to you directly. We’re not a typical design team at Raul Renanda Design either.

Everything you see here — every photo, every rendering — came out of my studio. My team works hard and learns hard, with my direction and mentoring. They’re a mirror of me. Same care for the craft.

People ask me all the time who I am, after thirty years of designing so many different things. I never have a short answer. So let me just show you the work and tell you what’s behind it.

What do I actually do? Buildings and interiors. That’s my bread and butter.

Now, you’ll probably notice the work looks different from one project to the next. Why? Honestly, because I’m interested in the problem, not in repeating myself. But look a little longer and you’ll see the pattern. Geometric. Fairly masculine. And I pay attention to the past while trying to see the future — not to copy what’s been done, but because a building has to feel familiar to the people living in it, and it still has to make sense in twenty years.

Think of a chef. A good chef can cook something new, outside their own tradition. But their hands know what they know, and their tongue decides. It still tastes like that chef.

Every project has to give something to two people. To you, and to me.

Mine is this: I can look at work I did thirty years ago and it still speaks. It’s still relevant. Not because I predicted anything, but because there was a grounded idea underneath it — a reason it was what it was. That’s what makes a design last.

Yours is simpler. There’s the pride when it’s finished, of course. It should feel different, but not outrageous, not trying to prove something. Calm confidence. But the real measure? Do you love using the space. Do you want to stay in it. That’s how I know it worked.

Sounds simple. It takes careful attention, and that attention is what I promise you on every project.

And we build it together. My ideas can be bold sometimes, but I do listen — because in the end it’s your project, not mine. You’re trusting me with your hard-earned money, your time, your budget. You’re the one who’ll live with it, take care of it, benefit from it.

That trust isn’t about my ego, or my name, or anything I’ve done before. You’ve handed me your project, and my team and I give it everything. That’s really all it is.

And I don’t assume I know everything about your life. I’ve been wrong before — corrected by clients who understood their own habits, their own family, their own business far better than I did. Some of the best ideas in my projects didn’t come from me. I’ve learned to listen for them.

Solving the challenges is the part I enjoy most. But knowing you, and having a good relationship during the project and long after it’s finished — that’s my main focus. Not the building. That part follows.

So, about me.

I was born in 1970 and studied architecture at Universitas Katolik Parahyangan, graduating in 1994. I started at Atelier 6 in Jakarta, where I learned to think bigger than the design brief. Then Singapore, twice — first with William Lim Associates, then with 3P Architects, where I learned professionalism and how to manage time and budget. I went to New Zealand to study Indonesian vernacular architecture while working remotely with a Singapore firm, came back through Singapore, and started my own practice in Jakarta around 2002. First with a partner, as Terrada Design. Then on my own, as Raul Renanda Design.

I have two studios. One in Jakarta, where I am most of the time, and one in Ubud Valley in Bali, next to my art gallery. I go down to Bali about once a month to see my team and the projects there. I’ll work anywhere in Indonesia, and I’ve worked internationally — built work in Singapore, concept work in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Australia.

What I’ve realized over the years is that my work sits somewhere between consultancy and my own expression as a designer.

There’s no single right way to do this. Every project is different. Every client is different. So I treat each one differently — the type, the challenge, the budget, whatever constraints you’re working within.

In practice, you’ll probably come to me in one of three ways.

Maybe you genuinely need my help to build the thing you’ve been dreaming about. Then I use my experience, my expertise, whatever I know, to make it happen for you. Mostly I’m guiding you through function, materials, color, and budget. A lot of commercial work sits here — the Telkomsel interiors, the train, the Nusantara Explorer, and much of the classical architecture.

Or maybe you want to work together. A real collaboration. Your input, my input, and we build it between us. Tompi — the jazz singer and aesthetic doctor — is a good example. So is the speaker design I did with Indra Lesmana and Aksan Sjuman, two legendary musicians.

Or the third, which is rarer. You respect what I do, you hand me the vision, and you trust me to keep my hands on it. Ben Atelier and the Anyer villa are the examples there.

None of these is better than the others. But it helps if we both know which one we’re in from the start.

I manage and design most projects personally. My team handles some, usually when the budget or other constraints call for it.

And yes, on paper this is contractual work. I make a living from design, you get someone who can solve your problem. Business as usual. But underneath, it’s always a relationship between two people — with emotion, hope, respect, and chemistry. I don’t look at size. One villa or a multi-building development, I don’t care how big or small it is, or where it is. If it’s genuinely challenging — the budget, the timeline, the expectations, or the need for something one of a kind — we’ll take it.

And the reasons vary more than people realize. Sometimes it’s the form. Sometimes the complexity, a real challenge. And sometimes, honestly, it’s just that I like you as a person.

About twenty years ago I had a fairly big studio, and I found we weren’t working as fast as I wanted. So I built a small dedicated team instead, supported by relationships with larger studios. We work fast, efficiently, and — surprisingly — at lower cost. I know everyone personally, and that matters. They can reach me any time. I’d rather have a few people who understand how my brain works than a lot of people I barely talk to.

Now, here’s the thing people neglect, and it’s the most important thing there is. The concept. The first idea.

I develop that with you directly.

The concept stage is where your project gets decided. A lot of designers rush through it. Make something that looks impressive, get you excited, deal with reality later. Then they spend the rest of the project fixing and changing things during construction.

This is wrong. It costs you budget, it costs you time, and it costs you your vision — because what gets built ends up far from what you were shown. It’s been common practice for years. It isn’t how we work.

I do it the other way around. Most of our time goes into thinking, rethinking, and asking whether a decision is actually right.

Because a wrong concept gives you a wrong project, no matter how well it’s built. The rest is technical — how to make it happen, and how to make it easier for the contractor, so they can do what they do best.

Behind us there’s a network of supporting companies and consultants for the work that doesn’t need to be ours — the routine things that eat time. My team stays on the part that makes something special. That’s how a small team handles everything from a small house to a large building, without the delay and cost of a big firm.

Roughly, I work to something like a seventy-thirty rule.

Seventy percent of a building should be common sense. Practical, functional, easy to build, using materials that are available and affordable. The remaining thirty is where the design really lives. Sometimes it’s twenty. On a commercial project it might be ten, because those are sensitive to time and budget.

How far we push the detail depends on what your building needs and what you want. Some people want minimal and quiet. Some want bold.

What changes most is scale.

If you’re building a house, every bit of spending has to be thought through, and the design has to sit inside what your builder can actually do. There’s room to play with detail, even at an artisan level, when it’s for your own home.

On a large project, it’s more about construction strategy. Details still matter, but the building system is what you have to get right, because that’s where the cost is. Anything modular or repeating has to be practical and easy to build. That’s what holds your budget. In that world the small details matter far less. Almost the opposite way of working.

Which is why no two projects are alike. And no two clients are either.

That’s the overall thinking. Now let me talk about design itself.

Modern design has to reflect the person, and the society it’s made in. Modern in the West isn’t modern in Asia. There are values here, symbolic things, that don’t exist anywhere else. Indonesia has its own character, whether we admit it or not, and it affects how we think. Our minimalism isn’t as minimal as the Scandinavian or Japanese version. Ours is warmer — pun intended — and it has emotion. Have you ever met an Indonesian who’s boring and robotic by nature?

I also do classical work, which surprises people who only know my recent work.

It started in 2002, when a client asked for it and I had to learn it from scratch. I love history and culture, so I didn’t mind. For one project I went to Paris many times, to study the French classical period and, more importantly, to understand how those buildings actually get built. In detail. Then I had to work out how to make it work in Indonesia.

It translated more seamlessly than people expect, especially on larger buildings — which is the opposite of what most people assume. Even some architects assume it. I’ve been there and built one. The Bukit Golf Pondok Indah house is the example. Every stone carved by hand, exactly the way they do it there.

For smaller houses I look at the Dutch colonial buildings here instead. That’s the better reference — they studied this climate a long time ago. Though remember, Jakarta, Bandung, and Surabaya had a very different climate back then.

Why does so much classical work in Jakarta fail? In my opinion it’s simple. People plan the building in a modern way and then stick classical details on top. It doesn’t work like that. The height, the size, the location of your site — those decide which classical language is even possible. That said, there are architects here doing so-called neo-classical work very, very well.

I also designed a Chinese peranakan-style house near SCBD. For that I studied traditional Chinese houses and mixed them with colonial style, the way peranakan communities across Southeast Asia built for generations.

For me, design is like music.

My father brought both jazz and classical into the house when I was a child. My taste went to jazz, because of the freedom in the improvisation. But most jazz players trained classically first. That’s how I see my own work. The modern design is strong because the classical training sits underneath it.