How fate brought Hong Kong newlyweds their perfect home, a haven in the heart of Mid-Levels
The stars aligned when Ally Chan and Jonas Schmid happened upon this walk-up apartment, which interiors studio Bean Buro helped transform into a home
Sometimes, it’s clear when the planets have aligned. That’s how newlyweds Ally Chan and husband Jonas Schmid felt when they chanced on an apartment that shone brighter than anything else in Mid-Levels.
“We’d looked at 20 to 30 apartments and none of them appealed to us,” says Schmid, who is from Switzerland. His Hong Kong-born wife continues: “They were all high-rises and every flat was kind of the same.”
So when the couple saw a “FOR SALE” sign for a tong lau (walk-up building) flat on one of Hong Kong’s most charming, leafy streets, Prince’s Terrace, they called the phone number listed.
Before long the pair would discover they had one up on any other potential buyer: the then owners of the two-bedroom, 900 sq ft flat recognised in the couple a younger version of themselves when they had bought the place in 2001: Hong Kong/Swiss and recently wed.
“They loved the flat so much and wanted to pass it on to people they knew would enjoy it too – not just investors,” Chan says.
And that is what the new owners have been doing, albeit in a space that now bears little resemblance to its previous incarnation. Architects Lorène Faure and Kenny Kinugasa-Tsui were behind the 60-year-old apartment’s transformation.
