Team spirit

Text Charmaine Chan / Styling Anji Connell / Photography John Butlin

Couples often make joint decisions when it comes to home renovations. Not Isobel and Antony Lee. To achieve their goal and maintain harmony, they decided to take responsibility for separate tasks. "We agreed from the beginning that he'd do function and I'd do look and feel," says Isobel. "If he made a decision about layout, I'd be fine with it."

So it was - and still is - in the 3,500 sq ft "very functional" Pok Fu Lam flat, which the couple created by acquiring the apartment next to the one they'd bought three years earlier, gutting both and fashioning distinct public and private zones. A transitional area segues between the bright, open living space of their former digs and the moodier, quieter side of the apartment, which now accommodates three en-suite bedrooms.

This "bridge" between light and dark is a study Isobel shares with her husband, a banker from New Zealand. It's this area that best displays her favourite styles (industrial, vintage and mid-century modern), examples of which she gave interior designer Richy Ng, of Box Design, in the stack of cuttings that accompanied the couple's brief. A rugged black-steel bookcase in the study is a thing of beauty, as are the tubular steel-and-leather Bauhaus chairs sourced through Artek, the company founded by modernist Finnish architect Alvar Aalto.

Continuity is achieved by an impressive engineered-wood floor throughout much of the flat.

"I wanted a look that was industrial but that felt a bit refined, hence the whalebone floorboards," says Isobel, a Hong Kong-born Australian design writer.