How Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s Works inspired Hong Kong architect to switch careers
- Vincent Lim, creative director of Hong Kong-based design studio Lim + Lu, which he founded with wife Elaine Manzi Lu, explains why he keeps the French brothers’ book on his desk
“Works” (2012) showcases the varied output of product designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. Vincent Lim Chin-hwa, creative director of Hong Kong-based design studio Lim + Lu, which he founded with his wife, Elaine Manzi Lu, explains how the French brothers’ book changed his life.
My wife and I trained as architects and thought we would always work in that field. But discovering “Works” was a turning point.
The book came out not long after I graduated from architecture school (Lim studied at Cornell University, in the United States). I’d just started my career in New York at Kohn Pedersen Fox, a big architectural practice known for skyscrapers and large, glass-clad office buildings. I stumbled across the book in the lobby of a boutique hotel in Saint-Germain (in Paris, France). Because I was kind of an architecture geek at the time – Cornell is very formal and everything is old-school – I’d never really touched on industrial design and had no idea who the Bouroullec brothers were.
Coming out of architecture school, we only wanted to build buildings and weren’t interested in furniture design or products. But I was captivated by the book and felt a gravitational pull to the Bouroullecs’ work, so I started doing some research into them.
In 2013, there was a retrospective of their work at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, in Paris. Elaine and I went to see it and it was a turning point in our careers. We found we wanted to explore a smaller, more intimate scale. In 2014, we founded Lim + Lu as a hobby, to design and produce furniture.
