Pearl joins the Shanghai social set

SHANGHAI looks as though it has become the place for well-heeled Hongkongers to plant their spare cash with news that former retailer and socialite Ms Pearl Lam is spearheading plans to open an exclusive social club there.

A month after P.S. revealed how the husband-and-wife team of Mr Patrick Chan and Ms Hemi Yip had started a property and retail business in Shanghai with Mr Julian Ho, Ms Pansy Ho, Mr Kevin Chau and Mr Jay Henry Leung, we hear that work has just started on a $54 million, 170-apartment complex with a club and offices, in China's largest city.

Situated in Hengshan Road, in the smart Xuhui district near Embassy Road, Gee's Club and apartment complex Gee's House will be ''a meeting of east and west'', promised Ms Lam, who is overseeing the project for her Shanghai-born mother's company.

''There is such a desperate shortage of places to go at night if you do not want to go to a disco. Gee's will be a place where consular staff, Chinese Government officials and overseas businessmen can meet in a comfortable social setting.'' She added that the club would have a 1930s ''colonial feel'' - despite the communists' hatred of the period, recalling notices in public parks that excluded ''dogs and Chinese''.

Ms Lam was clearly referring to the design of the five-storey, 300,000 square-foot building - with pale gold-coloured granite, dark bronze windows and doors, hardwood doors and floors, and polished marble, granite and bronze for the interiors.

''My mother remembers what it was like before 1949, and she wants to re-create the atmosphere of times passed,'' she said.