NewHong Kong designers escape for more room in Wong Chuk Hang
Creative minds quit the high rents in Central for the spacious environment of One Island South
When designers design their own projects, do they, as with celebrity offspring, make it a case of "mini-me"?
The various green elements of KplusK's new studio in One Island South, Wong Chuk Hang, suggest this might be the case. In March, the architecture firm, run by brothers Johnny and Paul Kember, moved to the newly hip area after 17 years in Soho, partly from a desire to spread their creative wings in a more spacious and like-minded environment, but also to escape Central's explosive rentals.
It was a chance to work next to the new Ovolo Southside, one of KplusK's largest Hong Kong hotel projects, and make the "lifestyle-changing" move from a vertical office spread over four floors to one level spanning 4,500 square feet.
"We designed our new studio to be functionally flexible, incorporating a lot of hot desking, and open to the main work environment to allow for cross-fertilisation of ideas with specialists," Johnny Kember says. "We invite people to use the studio as their own resource, and by doing so, creating meaningful, personal involvement with the KplusK team."
The studio is also used as a test bed to explore environmentally gentle materials and systems. "Most light sources are LED, at 3,000 Kelvin colour temperature (giving off a warm, reddish/orange light, which is supposed to be calming and relaxing) - the rest are low-e fluorescent tubes, called T5s," Kember says.
"We used new sustainable materials such as Forbo vinyl [supplied by JEB Group] as the main studio flooring, and new tech laminates from Challenge Pacific for walls in high-traffic areas." These laminates replicate materials such as concrete, Cor-Ten steel and zinc, he says.