Who is he? William Lim is the head of CL3, a Hong Kong studio known for arty and inventive office and restaurant interiors. CL3 recently created two Happy Valley Jockey Club party venues - Adrenaline and the Racing Club (right) - as well as Ying and Aurora at the Crown Macau. What's his story? Hong Kong-raised Lim studied architecture at New York's Cornell University and worked with Boston firm Flansburgh Associates for six years. In 1993 Lim set up CL3, which regularly wins accolades for its interiors. What does his company do? One of CL3's most successful early projects was an office for Nike, which drew the company into corporate interiors. A project with the Kowloon Shangri-La's Nadaman restaurant in 2003 led to a change in direction. 'They asked us in to talk about changing the upholstery, the colour of the cushions, but the project turned into a full-scale renovation,' Lim says. The success of the project has opened many a bellboy-assisted door and CL3 is working on a project for Marina Bay Sands in Singapore and has done designs for Marco Polo and the Royal Pacific Hotels Group. What characterises his work? Lim has brought art back into his foreground. His photography and multimedia creations - ink over superimposed images of architecture - have been exhibited and he tries to bring this artistic element into his work. 'Hong Kong's developers are still not as daring as some of the mainland's developers but it's definitely turning around,' he says. Where can we see this in action? In Adrenaline, a single streak of light twists through the bar in a fat LED ribbon while Nishimura, a restaurant in Beijing, has an installation carved by local artisans from a thousand or so sheets of plywood. Lim's bamboo installations have taken him to the Venice Biennale. 'A lot of people are starting to look at architecture more from its artistic side,' he says.
