Tiger Balm founders’ Hong Kong mansion a hotbed of heritage innovation as it takes on new role
- Refurbished Haw Par Mansion, in Hong Kong’s Tai Hang neighbourhood, is inspiring designers to come up with objects inspired by its history
- Haw Par enters the 21st century as a music foundation in tune with revitalisation and creativity
The Aw brothers, Boon Haw (Gentle Tiger) and Boon Par (Gentle Leopard), knew a thing or two about design. When they concocted a herbal ointment in 1920s Burma, they sold it in hexagonal jars with the orange feline that provided its name snarling, memorably, on the front.
Tiger Balm made their fortune; and when Aw Boon Haw built his Hong Kong home, Haw Par Mansion, he created a vast, public and equally unforgettable garden of tortured sculptures.
“The Tiger Balm Gardens were like Disneyland in the 1930s without Mickey Mouse,” says architect Roger Wu.
Those gardens have since disappeared, but after the usual stop-go government debate, the house has been conserved, renovated and turned into a music foundation, for which Wu is executive director of project development. (His business card states Haw Par Music Farm, a reference both to the nurturing of tender talent and the agricultural vale that was once Tai Hang.)
The mansion has also become the city’s latest peg upon which to hang the word “heritage”. In the week before the official opening on April 1, the Hong Kong Institute of Architects held a docent-training workshop there as part of a project called Co-Vitalise Our Heritage.