Designers take from the past for the city's future

When the restaurateur Josh Ng Pak-kei and his twin, Caleb Ng Pak-wah, were looking for someone to design the interior of their latest venture, a Sai Ying Pun pancake and cocktail bar called Stack, they wanted something rooted in Hong Kong.

"You can see there are a lot of architecture and interiors that are copying different styles from New York," Josh says. "I was thinking, 'Why can't we do something that really represents Hong Kong?'"

It was a mission that seemed especially important in Sai Ying Pun. The impending arrival of the MTR has sparked a boom in new bars, restaurants and shops in the hillside neighbourhood, many of them indistinguishable from those found in SoHo - whether that be Hong Kong, New York or London.

It's a similar story in other neighbourhoods, where rising rents have driven out many old shops and restaurants, along with their decades-old decor. And while designers such as Douglas Young, founder of lifestyle brand G.O.D., have successfully replicated elements of Hong Kong's vernacular design in projects such as Starbucks' bing sutt corner in Duddell Street - evoking the city's old-style cha chaan teng - others are asking themselves how to recall Hong Kong in a more contemporary way.

"We've been struggling with this issue for some time," says Wilson Lee, director of Wall Studio, which the Ng brothers hired to design Stack. "We don't want to just duplicate the patterns and design of old Hong Kong because that doesn't relate to the culture of Hong Kong nowadays. It has to be about the transformation of the old elements into something new.

"If you just copy something from the past and focus on the outlook, the spirit and meaning behind it is gone."