Hong Kong couple downsized to live it up in a 1,450 sq ft open-plan apartment
A semi-retired shipbroker and his foodie wife swapped their four-bedroom family house for an airy, spacious flat with a large kitchen
Three became one, bedrooms that is, when Simon and Tracy de Courcy Hughes moved into their 1,450 sq ft flat in Pok Fu Lam.
After 48 years in Hong Kong, three children and five grandchildren, the couple called time on their four-bedroom family house in the same area and decided to downsize.
“We went to see a lot of flats, and even made an offer on one in Conduit Road but they raised the price so we said no,” Simon says. They finally decided on a place 10 minutes down the road. “It was a rabbit warren. We’d seen it a couple of times and said, ‘Well, we’d better get Nic in to do something.’”
Enter Nicole Cromwell, a lifelong family friend and owner of Nicole Cromwell Interior Design, with plenty of ideas for turning the cramped three-bedroom flat into an airy and spacious one-bedroom home.
In the original layout, the front door opened “almost straight into the kitchen”, the helper’s room was in the middle of the flat and the living room had odd, misaligned windows, Cromwell says. But it was a decent space in a convenient location with a lovely view of the Lamma Channel.
As the couple’s grown-up children and their families also live in Hong Kong – “We’re lucky that they’re all still here,” Simon says – they had no need for a guest bedroom. This gave Cromwell the freedom to absorb two of the three bedrooms into other areas of her new floor plan: one into the large, open-plan kitchen, and the other into the master suite. A larger helper’s room is tucked into the space previously occupied by the kitchen.