A well-known cartoon character takes pride of place in a chic apartment without denting its owners' style credentials.
Cartoon character Snoopy takes on a whole new dimension in Edward and Rebecca Lee's Repulse Bay apartment. The loveable beagle features on a large Andy Warhol-style canvas in the living room, as abstract images across an entire wall above the bed in the master bedroom and with the rest of his colourful gang on a blue panel adjacent to the study.
'It wasn't part of any fixed design brief but the Lees mentioned they loved Snoopy,' recalls architect Antony Chan of Cream (tel: 2147 1297), the brains behind the project. 'Incorporating that element into a stylish home seemed a challenge, but once I started thinking up ideas it became fun.'
Instead of buying standard Snoopy prints, Chan worked with an art-production house to create an original variation on the theme. It took several months to get the colours and images the way he wanted - Chan used Warhol's silkscreen print of Marilyn Monroe as a guide for the living-room canvas - but everyone was happy with the result. 'The Lees are young and want to have some fun with their home,' says Chan. 'The Snoopy images stop the relatively minimal interior being too stark and boring but still manage to fit into an adult world.'
Rather than existing for purely aesthetic purposes, the pop-art canvas hides a wall-mounted flat-screen television and can be pushed aside at viewing time. 'TVs, especially those big plasma ones, can be invasive,' says Chan. 'This solution avoids the need for some kind of curtain, screen or cupboard.'
The artwork took almost as long to complete as the 2,400-square-foot apartment, which was gutted and remodelled down to the plumbing and wiring. Walls were demolished to make several large rooms from many small ones, and brick was substituted for glass walls and partitions. In the master bedroom, the 'wall' separating the room from the living space is backlit opaque glass. Even Edward's study between the kitchen and living areas is finished in glass, 'fish tank' style.