Hong Kong duplex with Japanese elements makes owner feel at home

The smell of wet hay hits you the moment Yasunori Omiya opens the door to his new home, in Tuen Mun. Sweet and earthy, the scent is one many associate with "old" Japan, where tatami flooring was the preferred surface on which to sleep, eat and receive guests - for those wealthy enough to have a spare room.

The washitsu (Japanese-style room) is one of many reminders of the country to which Omiya will one day return, with his Hong Kong-born wife, Queenie Leung, and their daughter, Ayaka, barely a year old.

"They want her to grow up the traditional Japanese way," says interior designer Samuel Ng, who joined two flats on different floors to create the 1,220 sq ft, five-bedroom duplex.

The upper flat - which the couple bought six months before snapping up downstairs and doubling their living area - contains the sitting and dining areas, the kitchen and two guest rooms. In the bathroom on this level - as in the two downstairs - there is another Japanese cultural export: the all-singing, all dancing bidet toilet with de rigueur warm seat. It even wears a terry cloth seat cover, just as its siblings in Japan might.

Still, Omiya, a businessman who has lived in Hong Kong for 15 years, says he doesn't feel like he's back in Japan when he returns from his nearby office. That's because, despite the Japanese touches, the sea-view duplex otherwise boasts a clean, contemporary Western design complemented by Italian brands such as B&B Italia, Flexform, Artemide and Boffi.

The difficulty in designing the duplex, says Ng, wasn't so much how to marry Japanese and other styles but pulling the two floors together so that guests "don't go upstairs or downstairs and feel as though they're entering a different flat".