Inside a French couple’s Lamma Island bolt-hole, which blends seamlessly with the great, green outdoors

Having fallen in love with a ground-floor apartment on Lamma Island, primarily for its location and outdoor space, Frenchmen Vincent Sahuc and Jerome Chabert began renovations in July 2018. Since they had a clear idea of what they wanted and were looking to cut costs, they managed the project themselves. But when they moved in, seven months later, their new home still didn’t have a kitchen or a bathroom.

“We bought a place on Lamma because we’d been spending almost every weekend there with friends and loved the natural life­style, but at that point we wondered what on earth had possessed us to leave our flat in SoHo,” recalls Sahuc, who has lived in Hong Kong for a decade, working in business develop­ment for high-end fashion and jewellery brands. “At one point, we were showering in the garden under a hose – it was cold and not very pleasant.”

Earlier, they had demolished all but a single interior wall in their quest to turn the 700 sq ft, dark and run-down village prop­erty into a modern, light-filled bolt-hole. Nevertheless, Sahuc and Chabert, who works in logistics, kept going.

“We are not interior designers – we’d never even renovated a place before – and we didn’t really have a plan. We just knew this place had real potential,” Sahuc says.

The pair decided on a simple layout that would allow them to create an open, airy living space that extended visually and seam­lessly into the garden. Out went walls and small windows, and in came floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors. Chabert and Sahuc enlarged the living area and merged it with the dining room and kitchen. They also created a large main bedroom and a smaller guest room but opted for a single spacious bathroom rather than two tiny en-suites.

“We also swapped the location of the kitchen and bathroom. Originally, the bathroom had windows while the kitchen had no natural light, which didn’t make sense,” Sahuc says.