'We had been doing an assortment of other things, but it was frustrating. We always felt that working in temples would bring us a lot of satisfaction, and we wanted to work for a special purpose,' said Lilley.

They especially wanted to make contact with Hong Kong's Indian community. so they faxed out their resume indicating design in which they specialise.

'He had been praying that morning that we could work on another temple here,' said Lilley. Later that day they had a phone call from the Hindu Association, which had intended to renovate the main hall of the Hindu Temple in Happy Valley for some years. A meeting was scheduled that afternoon, and Lilley and Annapurna started work last October.

Four months later, it still consumes much of their time, and the project is so extensive that it may take at least another year before completion. In that time, Lilley and Annapurna have completely changed the shrines encasing the various deities, transforming them from functional but uninteresting marble to a brilliantly coloured collage featuring traditional Indian motifs, with white and pink clay rose petals overhead. The project will move along as quickly as incoming donations to fund it will allow.

But if the finished product looks anything like the designers' vision, the renovated Hindu Temple is destined to be as much a tribute to art as it is to Hinduism. Lilley and Annapurna sculpted the motifs - mainly exotic birds and flowers - in clay, which were then cast in plaster of Paris and mounted on the original structure. The new motifs were hand-painted in soothing pastel shades.

The rest of the project will continue in this vein: their final sketches show the completed temple hall in regal purple and dusky pink, the windows will be pulled down and replaced with hand-painted glass, there are plans for a wall to be knocked down to extend the hall, and columns erected which will be covered with terracotta elephants. Throughout, the scene will be exotic, bright and colourful yet respectful of the religion and its followers.

More than anything else, Lilley and Annapurna are grateful for the opportunity to be able to re-create some of the magnificence of temples in India.

'We worked with artists in West Bengal, but the work we do today is a mixture of Indian style and our own. When it is finished, this temple will represent all the different regions of India,' he said.

In West Bengal, Lilley and Annapurna helped redesign traditional terracotta temples and travelled around to study the marble and red sand temples of Delhi and their majestic Mogul influences.

'One of our strengths is that we are able to read clients, extract from them what we need and give them what they want,' said Lilley. The husband-and-wife team are gradually attracting local interest because of their alternative approach to art and design. The name of their company - Saranagati Creative Arts - is the first hint that they are not going to come up with a brief that is full of Hong Kong cliches like halogen lighting, hi-tech lines or superficial opulence. Saranagati is Sanskrit for 'a place of complete surrender', and when Lilley and Annapurna refit an interior, that's the type of environment they imagine their clients would like to be in.

A Briton with a degree in fine art from High Wycombe College of Art and Technology in Buckinghamshire, Lilley spent 17 years in India where he met his Mexican-born wife. She studied art in her native country before pursuing her interests at Shanti Niketan, a village-like centre for arts education in West Bengal, founded by poet Rabindranath Tagore, where students have their classes under the trees in the gardens.

They believe the direction their work has subsequently taken has been sharpened by their years in India. Lilley and Annapurna admit that their first couple of years in the territory were a struggle as they competed with known names and tried to convey an earthiness in their work that is unfamiliar to Hong Kong.

'Here, people don't want to be the first to experiment. They wait for someone else to try something first,' he said.

The initial odd job led to more interesting ones: the couple began working on nature-inspired wall murals for offices, and were asked to introduce carved archways in the art gallery belonging to Pearl Lam. They also did a bronze sculpture of two young boys commissioned by their mother as a gift to her husband.

Also on their list of credits are two children's illustrated books published by the Oxford University Press, glass paintings for a garden restaurant in Parkview and a terracotta-landscape wall for a commercial building in Shanghai. Much of the hands-on work itself is done at their Lamma home.

'It's an old-style house with two floors, a garden and a separate studio that is 150 years old. It's an ideal place to be and maybe because we spend so much of our time there, we have a different approach to our work than other people,' said Lilley.

'We love this type of traditional work. It's not something we think about, we just want to do something that comes from us. Beauty is the most important thing,' he said.