Hong Kong couple's loft-inspired high-rise flat a design dream come true

Text Catherine Shaw / Photography Shia Sai Pui

Stepping into the Tregunter Path home of Tina Leung and Jason Chan, you can't help but do a double take. Instead of a typical Mid-Levels high-rise apartment, the door opens into a pristine, loft-inspired space flooded with natural light.

Leung, an in-house legal consul for a local company, and Chan, who works in the finance industry, had long wanted an open-plan living space, but had not been able to reconfigure the layout of their previous apartment, in an older block on the same road.

"The interior walls in our last apartment were all structural so there was nothing we could do to the layout," says Leung. "When we found this newer block, in 2013, in the same neighbourhood, and discovered only one pillar was structural, because it contains a pipe that goes through the entire building, we knew it would allow us to have everything we wanted."

The Hong Kong-born couple, who have a nine-year-old daughter, turned to interior designer Clifton Leung, whose work they had seen in magazines. His brief was to devise an open-plan concept for the 2,020 sq ft apartment.

Leung gutted the space. The new living areas replaced three small bedrooms, once accessed off a single corridor, and a large kitchen, previously closed off from the dining and living areas. The remaining space was devoted to two spacious en-suite bedrooms, separated by a large, glass-walled study.