Silk wallpaper, Taobao stools: Hong Kong apartment’s mix of luxury pieces and everyday items shows a design fan unafraid to break the rules

For publisher and entrepreneur Carmen Li, the decision to get involved with the “fun part” of renovating her 1,500 sq ft (139 square metre) flat in Jardine’s Lookout on Hong Kong Island – devising the floor plan, choosing the colour schemes and furniture – took a more serious twist when the long-term design fan realised how much she did not know.

“We’d had the flat for a few years while we were living in Clear Water Bay. But I’d decided to move back into the city with my son, Vincent, just the two of us,” Li says.

“I was working on the project with a friend, Clement Cheng [of Clement C Studio]. He was going to deal with the technical and structural issues and I was doing the fun part. But I soon realised interior design was more technical than I thought; the contractor was asking things like where the back end of the air con was going to go, and I didn’t know. So I decided to learn.”

Taking advantage of a lull in business during the pandemic, and having already closed her monthly gourmet magazine, Crave, Li embarked on a two-year course in interior design, taught partly by Hong Kong-based interior designer J.J. Acuna, with whom she later did a three-month internship.

It was a steep learning curve, with coursework fitted in around running her business, 21 Concepts – recently rebranded as a multidisciplinary publishing, online content and interior design studio – and the renovation.

“It was overwhelming at first,” she says of the course. “Then I had a light-bulb moment. I see similarities between magazine flat plans and floor plans: both are about pacing, rhythm, structure.”