‘Small and dated’ Hong Kong apartment becomes spacious and timeless with clever use of lighting and white paint
- Despite being 1,500 square feet, artist Betty C Fan’s Tai Tam apartment felt cramped. The remedy lay in design technique, rather than spatial realignment
- The whole home is painted in gallery white, which pares back the architectural detail, focusing attention on the artworks and sculptural furniture
When Betty C Fan said she wanted the refit of her new home to start with “a blank canvas”, she meant it literally.
The Hong Kong-based multimedia artist was drawn to this Tai Tam flat because the windows framed views of the enveloping mountains – representing, to her artist’s eye, “a live painting”.
Fan wanted the interior decor to be consistent with that theme. Because the 21st-floor Parkview flat doubles as a creative space for the digital side of her work, it also had to be a place of inspiration.
Despite being 1,500 square feet (140 square metres), the flat felt “small and dated”, says Fan, herself a trained architect. The remedy lay in design technique, rather than spatial realignment – although one of the three former bedrooms was made smaller to function as her digital workspace, the leftover floor space used to expand the dining room.
For instance, the entrance had a mirrored ceiling intended to compensate for its low height (due to the air-conditioning mechanism behind it).
This actually had the opposite effect, says Rowena Gonzales, principal of Liquid Interiors, which undertook the renovation of the flat.