Hasta La Ideas

Interior designer Ilse Crawford’s London practice Studioilse has created the interior for a multipurpose arts space and restaurant in central Hong Kong with a lush garden terrace overlooking the city (+ slideshow).

The owners of the Duddell’s venue asked Studioilse to design the interiors of the downstairs dining room, as well as a salon, library and roof terrace upstairs.

All of the rooms feature an extensive array of artworks and are regularly used to host exhibitions and cultural events including discussions and film screenings.

“The greatest challenge was to make a space that could change over time and to really understand what was going to happen there,” Studioilse’s creative director Sarah Hollywood told Dezeen.

“We created spaces that would meet different needs during the morning, noon or night so it became a place of layers based on behaviour,” she added.

Both floors perform different roles throughout the day, with the dining room hosting noisy dim sum lunches and more relaxed evening meals.

The upstairs rooms are used for working, meetings and tea drinking during the day and become more vibrant, bustling spots for evening entertainment.

Throughout the interior, Studioilse employed tactile natural materials such as wood, bronze, concrete and the silver travertine marble used to clad the reception area and stairwell.

“Sensorial natural materials were chosen to provide a great, unusual background to the art instead of the normal white box background that art tends to be shown on these days,” Hollywood explained.

Familiar Asian shapes and materials that appear in details such as the decorative panelled windows complement the traditional dim sum served in the restaurant and the regional art that is on show.

“The key was to create a credible local identity rather than a pastiche,” said Hollywood. “We did this by incorporating a combination of Hong Kong cultural references together with some continental details in the mix.”

Tall plants surrounding the roof terrace give it the impression of a secluded garden, with green tones used on the upholstery of settees and armchairs echoing the colour of the plants and recurring across some of the furniture in the adjoining salon.

The green theme continues in the restaurant downstairs, where plants line the windowsill behind a long bench seat covered in bright yellow cushions.

Concrete floors and marble walls contrast with decorative rugs and sensuous floor-to-ceiling drapes in the upstairs salon.

Bright red table bases and corner sofas help to give this space a more lively feel than the more refined restaurant downstairs.

Photography is by Robert Holden.

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secluded garden in central Hong Kong appeared first on Dezeen.

Australian skincare company Aesop has opened a new signature store in Hong Kong that features shelving made from blackened steel, plus sinks made of oak and copper.

Designed by Aesop‘s in-house design team, the store’s pared-back theme is intended to contrast with the busy antiques shops that it sits alongside on Hollywood Road in the city’s central district.

The designers said they used the neutral colour of pale oak to create “an immersive sense of calm,” while raw materials such as steel, oak and oxidised copper attempt to create an industrial aesthetic.

Shelves made from oak beams set into blackened steel frames line one wall to display the brand’s distinctive brown glass bottles. On the opposite wall, brass garden taps are mounted over large copper sinks.

A treatment room where customers can consult Aesop’s staff for advice about the products is concealed behind a screen at the back of the store, which contains a wooden sink and drawers behind a metal mesh cupboard door.

Aesop ensures that no two store are alike. Founder Dennis Paphitis told Dezeen that he was “horrified at the thought of a soulless chain” and that he believes there is “a direct correlation between interesting, captivating store spaces and customer traffic within a store”.

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pale oak, copper and blackened steel appeared first on Dezeen.

Movie: in our next exclusive video interview from Inside Festival, interior designer Joyce Wang discusses the custom-made fittings and furniture she designed for Ammo bar and restaurant in Hong Kong.

Ammo, which won the Bars and Restaurants category at last month’s Inside Festival, is part of a new museum and headquarters for the Asia Society in Hong Kong.

“It was previously an ammunition storage facility that the British used to store explosives about a hundred years ago,” Wang explains. “We were asked by the client to convert the space into a museum café and from that a more luxurious and high-end dining experience was born.”

Despite only having three months to take the project from design conception to completion, Wang says that most of the furniture and fittings were custom-made for the project, including three sculptural chandeliers shaped like spiral staircases.

“Practically everything apart from the lightbulbs [was custom designed],” Wang claims. “We didn’t want people to identify any of the furnishings, accessories or bits of furniture.”

She continues: “The space has three feature staircase chandeliers. We worked closely with the fabricator and lighting consultant on how to use plumbing pipes to construct these really complicated forms and have electricity running through them.”

Wang says she wanted the restaurant to be dramatic because many people would use the space to enter the museum as well as eat there.

“The arrival experience was very important to us,” she says. “Instead of conceiving of it as a museum café it became this lobby of arrival for the museum. We wanted it to have different clues as to what was going to happen upstairs in the museum.”

“A lot of people visit the restaurant and they don’t realise that the bunker-like ceiling pays tribute to the vaulted ceiling of the museum above.”

The restaurant has been very successful since it opened, Wang claims.

“There’s a two-month-long waiting list and it’s difficult to get into, especially for dinner,” she says. “I think it’s an interesting space because from lunchtime to dinner it really feels quite different.”

This movie was filmed at Inside Festival 2013, which took place at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore from 2 to 4 October. The next Inside Festival will take place at the same venue from 1 to 3 October 2014. Award entries are open February to June 2014.

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features “spiral staircase” chandeliers appeared first on Dezeen.

Le photographe allemand Nick Frank, après sa superbe série Munich Subway, nous propose de superbes clichés de la ville d’Hong-Kong pris depuis les hauteurs de la ville. Réunie sous le nom « Hong-Kong Cityscapes », cette série mixant images en couleurs et en noir et blanc est à découvrir dans la suite.

This luxury apartment building in Hong Kong references the local vernacular of overcrowded high-rise towers covered in ad hoc extensions.

International architecture firm Aedas designed the serviced apartment building for a small site in Mongkok, which is one of the world’s most densely populated neighbourhoods.

The architects drew on the local tendency to add balconies to apartments in tower blocks to maximise views, but “reinterpreted these structures in a modern way, using irregular protrusions to create unobstructed views for each apartment.”

Aedas also added a living wall to the bottom of the facade that was “inspired by the home gardens which people create on the balconies”.

The living wall will introduce greenery to the busy street and will be supplemented by planting in the area vacated by setting the building’s podium back from the street.

Also in Hong Kong, Zaha Hadid’s Innovation Tower for Hong Kong Polytechnic University is nearing completion and Herzog & de Meuron has been selected to design a visual culture museum in the new West Kowloon Cultural District. See more stories about Hong Kong »

Aedas recently won a competition to design a twisting 33-storey skyscraper for Shanghai, China, and is working with Dutch firm MVRDV on the design of a new business district in the city.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

Aedas designs a serviced apartment building in one of the most densely populated places on the planet

With a population density of 130,000 people per square kilometre, Mongkok, a neighbourhood in Hong Kong, is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Aedas was appointed to design a serviced apartment building in this hyperdense district, whose construction work commenced recently.

Standing on a site of 614 square metres, which is challengingly small, the building will offer serviced apartment accommodation to occupants. In the early post-war years, it was common to create illegal iron balconies for residential units in Mongkok to acquire maximum view. Aedas reinterpreted these structures in a modern way, using irregular protrusions to create unobstructed views for each apartment.

Inspired by the home gardens which people create on the balconies, Aedas designed a green wall that seemingly protrudes from the solid façade of the podium to further connect the building with the historical cityscape. This green wall will also enhance the quality of life for the neighbourhood by increasing the provision of greenery at the pedestrian level.

The building is set back from the street to allow more opportunities for planting, which creates a breathing space in the middle of the dense neighborhood and provides rare greenery. It also transforms the outdoor landscape space into an urban backdrop for the building’s public areas such as an entrance lobby on the ground level and a transit lift lobby on the second floor.

The design sets an example of contemporary interpretation of traditional architecture.

Project: Composite Building at No. 78-88 Sai Yee Street
Location: Hong Kong
Architect: Aedas
Client: Good Standing (Hong Kong) Limited
Site area: 614 square meters
Gross floor area: 5,514 square meters

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by Aedas appeared first on Dezeen.