Design couple’s Hong Kong home their showcase
Young Cornell-trained pair from Hong Kong and China who worked for leading New York design firms sweep away walls and boundaries in a 1,200 sq ft Happy Valley flat
Designing your own home is about so much more than putting a stylish roof over your head when you are a young architect with a new design studio. Doing so also offers a showcase for your skills and creativity.
So when Hong Kong-born Vince Lim Chin-hwa, 27, and his fiancée, architect Elaine Manzi Lu, 28, renovated their apartment, they seized the opportunity to experiment with versatile contempo-rary furnishings.
The couple met while studying architecture at Cornell University, in upstate New York, in the United States. After working for leading design firms, including New York’s Kohn Pedersen Fox and Robert AM Stern Architects, they relocated to Hong Kong this year to found lifestyle design studio lim+lu.
Their 1,200-sq-ft, family-owned apartment, tucked away in a leafy cul-de-sac near Happy Valley racecourse, was a typical Hong Kong flat with three bedrooms leading off a long central corridor and a separate kitchen, living area and dining room. But not any more.
The couple’s new open-plan layout gives the impression of space, creating a light-filled interior by removing the walls between the kitchen and living and dining areas, and transforming one of the adjacent bedrooms into a study with suspended glass and black powder-coated stainless-steel sliding doors.