How a huge Hong Kong flat became a family home, complete with a gold fireplace
Why, when a homeowner says ‘I don’t want to be like Donald Trump!’, do his interior designers insist on metallic embellishments?
Jason Caroline Design’s colour choice for the monolithic suspended chimney that forms the focal point of this 4,500 sq ft, three-bedroom Bowen Road flat proved controversial.
“Gold?” spluttered the client, William Wong. “I don’t want to be like Donald Trump!”
And yet gold it is. Not gaudy Trumpian bling, but a muted, subtly metallic shade that gleams over a massive stone hearth and minimalist gas fire. Even so, Wong took some persuading by his wife, Ophelia, and husband-and-wife design team Jason Yung and Caroline Ma.
“[William] didn’t want the apartment to be flashy. But if we’d gone with what William wanted, the whole place would be dark with barely even a mirror,” Ophelia says. “I didn’t want it to be flashy either, but I did want it to be warm for our son, Nathaniel. In the end, we split it: William decided on the bathrooms and the electronics – he’s an IT guy and wanted TVs everywhere – and I took care of everything else.”
Which is why the flat’s colour palette is muted but warm, with shades of taupe and grey complemented by natural wood and stone, and gorgeous matt-glass panels with a texture like peach skin. As well as the gold chimney, the scheme is brightened by pops of yellow, blue and even purple in the soft furnishings (“We got away with the purple dining chairs by telling William the only other choice was bright pink,” Ma says).
One of the biggest challenges was the size – it’s so big. We needed to find a way to scale down the spaces to make them cosier, and we came up with the pivoting screens
The colours help to define the spaces in this huge flat, which was created from two mirror-image neighbouring units. The two former living rooms now form a large open-plan living space, with bedroom wings behind structural walls at either end, two kitchens to the left of the entrance and a study to the right. Structural and external walls placed at angles create odd-shaped spaces, which meant much of the storage had to be custom made.