Cooped up by the coronavirus, a marathon runner decluttered her Hong Kong home
Overwhelmed by a decade’s worth of stuff, an amateur athlete sought help from a designer to return her Kennedy Town home to its original glory
On the top floor of a 100-year old, three-storey tenement in Kennedy Town, Singaporean Poh Hiang Tan couldn’t see the proverbial wood for the trees. Years of working in finance combined with her high-energy hobby of marathoning across the globe allowed little time for organising her two-bedroom home. “I was just too busy. I would put things into boxes or bags and then pile them on top of more boxes and bags,” says Tan.
Over a decade, the 1,100 sq ft apartment’s beautiful olde-worlde Chinese features – ceramic tiled floors, cracked-ice patterned windows, wooden archways and classic rosewood furniture – became camouflaged by a sea of cardboard, shopping bags, exercise equipment and clothes hangers, and then coronavirus came along.
Grounded and working mainly from home, Tan sank into despondency when the sheer amount of clutter became apparent. It was time to call in an expert. Brazilian Flavia Markovits came to the rescue with her no-nonsense approach to styling homes. While Markovits has seen Marie Kondo’s Netflix series, she doesn’t go in for the hugging, thanking and saying goodbye to unwanted items. “I am more hands-on,” she says. “I get in and do the job.”
Markovits also works on the overall aesthetic – think Kondo but with interior design kudos.
The paring-back project began in the main bedroom, with its balcony opening onto protected pine trees and birdsong. Pointing to the heavy wooden wardrobe, among a number of items that came with the apartment, Markovits says, “I completely changed the layout of the bedroom furniture as the way the bed and wardrobe were positioned before didn’t leave much space – and there was clutter everywhere.”