WITH SO MANY products designed to attract attention, it's refreshing to find a company that aims to blend inconspicuously into your life. Like the dietary staple it is named after, Milk Design focuses on devising products that you need and use every day without thinking twice about them.
The only problem is this company's products are so stylish and clever, you end up giving them more than just a cursory glance. The Bacchus line of wine-oriented products, for example, for which the company won a Federation of Hong Kong Industries award last year, is funky and functional, and its amoeba-shaped stackable wine rack (pictured, top right) can be easily extended as your 'cellar' increases.
'Design can be a daunting concept,' says Lee Chi-wing who set up Milk Design with Herman Cheung in 1998. 'The majority of people want something a bit different but not too off the wall or weird. We try to make contemporary design solutions accessible to everyone - things that fit into all kinds of homes.'
One of the company's brands, Zense (from the words Zen and sense), tries to generate 'an almost spiritual feeling of tranquillity'. Its Hookoo series (pictured, below right) comprises a rounded canister, storage box, vase, medicine chest and frosted alarm clock, all of which hang from a wall-mounted rack. Such practical objects might sound dull, but their contemporary shapes make storage suddenly seem fun.
Cheung and Lee were in the same class at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 1989, but didn't join forces until almost a decade later. Cheung set up his own company, Adda, and Lee headed to Paris for four years after he won a design scholarship from the French Government. When Lee returned to Hong Kong, he got in touch with Cheung and Milk Design was born soon after.
In addition to designing their own product lines, Lee and Cheung offer a consultancy service for companies which need product-development inspiration.
'Our mission is to come up with unique, creative designs that will stand out in what has become a crowded market. The end result can be simple but it has to be clever,' Lee says.