Life.Culture.Discovery.

VideoHong Kong fashion designer’s colourful, creative home

Lim + Lu employs pastel hues, rich jewel tones and gold details to add glamour, romance and just the right amount of luxe to Paris-based designer’s Tseung Kwan O apartment

Deep, rich shades and soft curves inform Lim + Lu’s design scheme throughout the apartment. Photography and video: John Butlin. Photo assistant: Timothy Tsang.

Published: 5:49pm, 13 Mar 2018Updated: 8:17pm, 4 May 2021

Home shoots often begin with a flurry of activity. Rooms are straightened, tables set, cushions plumped and the unsightly carted away. Only when everything is just so, and foreheads are mopped, do our interviewees disappear to ready themselves for the camera.

Not Manix Wong Ping-tao. We arrive at his newly decorated, 500 sq ft rental apartment in Tseung Kwan O to find music burbling in the background and every room picture perfect. Not only that but, attired in a bright blue suit and yellow tee, he perfectly matches his furniture. Or vice versa.

That was probably to be expected. Wong, a Hong Kong-born, Paris-based menswear designer with his own brand, Laclos, knows better than most how to create a look. What is perhaps surprising is that he trusted someone else to pull together colours and textures throughout his two-bedroom flat: pink, orange, yellow, taupe and two shades of blue ensure the interiors pop, alongside metallics, marble, wood and felt.

I like contrasting materials and colours. I said, ‘Just go for the most exciting combinations.’ When I come back here for half the year I want to think, ‘WOW!’

Manix Wong

“I wanted it to be unexpected,” Wong says, explaining he didn’t want the palette to be predictable or necessarily “his” colours. So he enlisted designers Vince Lim Chin-hwa and Elaine Manzi Lu, the husband-and-wife team behind Lim + Lu. Wong had met the pair in his capacity as Hong Kong director of Maison & Objet, when they won the Rising Asian Talent award at the lifestyle trade show last year. When Wong visited the couple’s Happy Valley home, an elegant-yet-hip space of pastel-meets-glossy hues, he says, “I loved it; they were so different from other designers in Hong Kong.”

Last year, when Wong decided to move to Tseung Kwan O (he splits his time between Hong Kong and Paris, where he has lived since 1999), he asked for their help.

“He was quite specific about what he liked, and very opinionated about what he didn’t like, so we had a pretty good idea to begin with,” Lu says.