A French art curator’s gallery-like home in Hong Kong

Most people like to put a personal stamp on their home but Lalie Choffel’s 1,230-sq-ft rented apartment, on the south side of Hong Kong Island, is a particularly strong reflection of who she is and what she does. French-born Choffel is the creative force behind Tu Ying Productions, which pro­duces and manages art events in Asia and France. She is also the founder of Charbon, a multipurpose art space and gallery in Aberdeen, where she hosts art and cultural exhibitions, contemporary performances and film screenings.

The curator-collector started buying art and antiques three decades ago, when she ran an antiques boutique in a Parisian flea market. Fittingly, her three-bedroom, three-bathroom home in Hong Kong is filled with a fascinating assortment of artworks, antiques, quirky pieces of furniture and other curios.

“I find things at a mixture of places: art fairs and galleries, and flea markets, mainly in Paris, America and London,” she says. “We travel a lot and have homes in Tokyo, London, Paris and the south of France as well as in Hong Kong, so I have objects that come from a wide variety of sources. There is always a story behind ‘meeting’ an object, falling in love with it and buying it.”

Choffel’s only rule for choosing which pieces to buy and display is that there are no rules. She collects pieces because she likes them and finds them a space in her home rather than buying them with a specific display area in mind.

An antique skull, circa 1850, sits in the main bedroom by a contemporary acrylic sculpture of a bandaged rhino head. Dried geckos and butterflies, caught in the garden and hand-framed by Choffel’s daughter, Lotus, are as treasured as large-scale canvases by well-known artists. Likewise, when it comes to furniture, Choffel mixes top-end brands and vintage collector pieces, such as the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chaise longue, with more run-of-the-mill items from Ikea and mainland China.