The wood comes first
We will not rush a board off the rack. If our timber wants three weeks of standing time, it gets three weeks. The schedule is built around the wood, not the other way around.
Home · About the atelier
A small Kuala Lumpur workshop, eight makers on the floor, eleven years in.
Cleariqo Atelier is not a brand. It is a building in Damansara, a rack of kiln-dried boards, and a handful of people who have spent the last decade learning where furniture quietly fails — and how to keep it from doing that for you.
A short history
From a borrowed thicknesser to a finished rack of jobs.
Our founder, Khairul Hisham, trained as an industrial designer, fell in love with the bench, and apprenticed under a Penang cabinetmaker for three years. He opened the workshop in 2013 with one cabinetmaker, Ravi, who is still here. Their first job was a dining table for fourteen, ordered by an architect who could not find what she wanted on any showroom floor.
By the second year we had added an upholsterer, an apprentice, and a single rule: nothing leaves this room until the maker who built it is willing to sign their initials on the underside. That rule has not moved in eleven years.
Today the team is eight: three cabinetmakers, an upholsterer, a finishing specialist, a junior maker, an office manager who runs the schedule like a metronome, and Khairul, who still picks up the orbital sander when a piece is running late.
What we will and will not do
Six small principles, written on the wall above the bench.
One pair of hands per piece
From the rough cut to the wax. The maker who starts a piece is the one who signs it off, and you can ask for them by name when something needs attention.
We say no to ten things a year
If a job is wrong for us — veneered chipboard, mass-produced runs, a brief that needs cheap labour to make sense — we say so, and we point you to someone better placed.
Honest pricing, written down
You receive a single quote with the wood cost, the bench hours, the upholstery, the finish, and the delivery, all listed separately. There is no ‘client tier’ pricing here.
Repairs are free if we built it
Joints, hinges, finish, re-caning — if it came out of this workshop, it comes back free of labour as long as we are here. Wood replacements are at cost.
The room beats the photograph
We are happy when our work looks unremarkable in your living room. It is not a stage piece. It is a chair, or a table, or a bed — meant to settle in and be lived with for thirty years.
By the numbers
Eleven seasons, written down.
We do not run growth meetings, but we do count the boards.
11
Years on Jalan Industri
8
Makers on the floor
324
Commissioned pieces, 2024
62%
Repeat or referred clients
Who tends to walk in
A roster small enough to remember by first name.
Most of our clients live in Kuala Lumpur or the Klang Valley. A good portion are second-time buyers — they bought a dining table from us in 2017 and have come back for the chairs that go with it. Others are architects and interior firms who would rather work with one bench than a fleet of subcontractors.
We also build for a small handful of cafés, restaurants and boutique-hotel suites. We will not pretend that we can deliver thirty rooms in a fortnight, but we will quietly turn out three rooms over a season that you will not be embarrassed to put guests in.
If you are an interior firm with a client brief and a deadline, please write directly to [email protected] — that line is read by the studio manager every morning.
Want to see the workshop?
Visits are by appointment, including weekends.
The bench is open to clients in the design stage. Bring photographs of the room, measurements if you have them, and an hour of patience — we like to spend that first hour properly.