A Hong Kong family home with a mid-century modern vibe has pops of colour and custom furniture
- A Mid-Levels apartment has been cleverly designed to adapt to a young family’s future needs, right down to the placement of wall sockets in a child’s room
- To encourage conversation the living room features a television whose screen can feature artworks and movie stills
Five years ago, Hong Kong lawyers Raymond Cheng and Joyce Lai earmarked an interiors project by Keith Chan Shing-hin of Hintegro that they saw in the pages of Post Magazine. The couple didn’t have a property that needed renovating; nor was buying one even on their radar. They simply liked the featured flat.
Fast forward to 2021, when their forward thinking paid off. Cheng and Lai had decided to buy a family home and, after an extensive search, chose a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in Mid-Levels on Hong Kong Island, which needed renovating. They remembered Chan and found him, via Google.
“Luckily there was an instant rapport between us all,” says Lai. “I must confess that our initial brief was rather vague. We still had the pages of our favourite projects from Post Magazine and we knew we liked Japanese and Scandinavian aesthetics but that was about it.”
Several meetings later and Chan and his colleagues Sunny Lai Shek-yeung and Rebecca Yu Pui-man had a design scheme that resonated with the couple. Although they gutted the 1,666 sq ft (155 square metre) flat, structural walls meant the floor plan didn’t veer far from the original layout.
One of the main considerations was whether to open up the kitchen but the cons (cooking smells, smoke and mess) outweighed the pros of a larger, more integrated space.
Chan created a hatch between the two rooms, with a sliding window that could be closed to keep all culinary action contained within the kitchen but still allow the “chef” to view activity in the living and dining area.