What a Hong Kong interior designer’s home looks like

Good interior design should not only be beautiful but also reflect the personalities of its owners. By either measure, George and Hay Lam’s home in Tai Po is a roaring success. Bright, modern and well organised, the apartment has oodles of character, which derives from charming details, unexpected materials and a strong sense of fun. This is a home with a smile on its face and a wink in its eye.

And yet many elements of the design came about by happy accident. Some features were fortunate discoveries (see Tried + tested) or caused by suppliers sending the wrong materials while others were a result of interior designer George – an associate with Bugs Design Consultants – throwing a professional eye over the work in progress and saying, “Stop!” The concrete wall running the length of the living room and kitchen, for example, was to be smooth and even in colour. But after the contractors had completed a section of the kitchen wall, George decided he preferred the different shades and textures of the unfinished concrete slapped onto the living room wall, so he called a halt to the work and declared it good.

“The contractors couldn’t believe it,” he says. “But I liked the organic grid pattern of the raw concrete left by the building works. We tried to achieve the same look in the bedroom, but concrete isn’t easy to work with and it took a few attempts.”

Removing the false ceiling throughout the apartment led to other serendipitous discoveries. As the 900 sq ft apartment is on the top floor, the contractors uncovered 12-foot-high ceilings, often sloping at unusual angles, adding drama and a feeling of airiness to even the smallest rooms. The ceiling of the sole bedroom, with en suite, is an intriguing collection of planes and angles. Positioned in a corner of the building, the roof slopes in two directions and the Lams left a section of the false ceiling for storage and to hide ducting in the ensuite bathroom.

A high-gloss white epoxy floor gives a sci-fi gleam to the space. In contrast with the shiny floor, George specified industrial materials, such as those raw concrete walls and black steel doors with panels of opaque safety glass to allow light to pass between rooms. The guest bathroom has a wall-sized sliding door covered with blackboard paint where George and Hay, a product designer, get busy with chalk: their latest creation is a doodle monster.