IN HIS way, interior decorator Rico Leung Wai-kwong has had more influence on Hong Kong homes than the combined talents of Philippe Starck and Simon Jackson. For the past five years, he has been the man behind all those mock-up rooms in Ikea, the Swedish budget furniture chain.
Leung, the company's assistant decorating manager for Hong Kong, co-ordinates a team of 25 staff, who design everything from the positioning of price tags to full-scale living room displays featuring orange Anneberg sofas or the pine effect of Timmerman storage space.
They design 60 Hong Kong-size model lay-outs in the Causeway Bay branch of Ikea - the biggest furniture shop in the territory. The designs are replaced twice a year, with smaller adjustments every month, depending on the success of each display. 'We check the sales figures to see if a design is selling,' Leung says, 'and if it isn't we make some changes.' Each design takes about a week to plan and two days to put together.
The instant home decor is not meant to be slavishly reproduced, Leung says. 'We just offer a guide, so people can pick the parts they like.' Occasionally, the finer details attract the most attention. 'Sometimes, people only want to buy the things that aren't Ikea products, like the pictures in the frame or the tiling!' Of course, it's never just a question of aesthetics. Leung's team work in what he describes as a creative balance with the marketing department. Each display has to fulfil not just his ideas about space, colour, texture and taste, but also a detailed brief aimed at a particular customer.
'We are told the age, the sex, the budget, and we discuss what is suitable with marketing. Sometimes we disagree, and have to negotiate.' The living room space is laid out with close regard for the average Hong Kong home: only 10.5 metres square. In the show flat, black leather sofas and glass-topped tables are laid out around a diamond shape which, Leung explains, is typical of new apartments coming on the market.
The show flat in hi-tech black was based on last year's preference for dark colours. 'But recently the trend has begun to change and people want warmer colours, not black and white, using natural materials.' Leung offers a couple of tips for making the most of space on a modest budget: multi-purpose use of storage space (using the top of a chest of drawers as a television stand, for instance) and effective lighting. 'A lot of Chinese people only like central lighting,' he says, ' but we encourage people to have special lighting for different functions, for example, a desk lamp, a reading light over the sofa, another on the book shelves.' The decorators also check the displays every morning before the shop opens to make sure the displays are intact. 'A lot of small things go missing,' Leung says. 'Sometimes people just move things around to where they think they look better.' Petty pilfering is the reason all the books in the bookshelves in Ikea shop displays are in Swedish. 'If they were in English, they would disappear.' But putting together imaginary homes for other people all day does not leave Leung much inclination for doing up his own home with Ikea products. 'I live with my family in a 1,000 square foot flat, so I can't design the whole flat in my own style, but we have some Ikea cabinets in the kitchen,' says Leung, who has a degree in three-dimensional design.