A Hong Kong bachelor pad gets a bold, bright and blue update

Interior designers may dream of having a free rein on projects. But as Wesley Liu recently discovered when creating a bachelor pad in Sheung Wan, working without a brief can also be a burden.

“There weren’t really any processes of approval,” says Liu, founder of PplusP Designers. “The client just passed the whole project on to me. I didn’t know what he’d think of it.”

But the designer need not have worried. “When it was all done,” Liu remembers, laughing, “he came in and was like, ‘Wow!’ It was just like a TV show.”

Liu kept the original three bedrooms and two bathrooms but redesigned the 1,106 sq ft flat to be a home-from-home for his client, who is currently at university in Britain. When the client is not using it during term breaks, members of his exten­ded Malaysian-Chinese family stay over, sometimes moving in for weeks on end, according to Liu.

“It’s a very special situation,” he says. “Because the client doesn’t live here all the time it’s not like a typical Hong Kong apartment, where we have to maximise storage because everything has to be hidden away. It meant I could take a hotel, holiday-home approach to the space.”

One of the first things Liu did was to knock down a wall between the living room and the kitchen, creating a sleek, open-plan space for entertaining. One request from the client, who likes to cook, was that he wanted to be able to serve his friends food and drink easily. “So an open-bar concept was best,” says Liu. Parties can also spill outdoors because the room opens to a balcony with sweeping city views of Poho (the area around Po Hing Fong) and Sai Ying Pun.