'My favourite place anywhere in the world is on the terrace of the Ladies Recreation Club, overlooking the tennis courts, having a glass of wine,' says Brad Davis, co-founder of the design company Fort Street Studio. For someone who lives in New York and travels every two months to destinations all over the world, this may sound surprisingly specific. But Davis has good reason to like Hong Kong - it is where he and Janis Provisor (his partner in business and in life) started their now flourishing luxury silk carpet company.
'To have started a business like this from scratch would have been impossible anywhere else in the world,' Davis says. 'It's an entrepreneur's dream. We were a couple of artists who didn't know anything about carpets or how to sell them. People here have been extraordinarily helpful to us.'
Hong Kong fell in love with Fort Street Studio's designs as much as the designers fell for the city. 'We're in many of the best homes in Hong Kong,' Davis boasts, before adding: 'If not all.' With the Chinese consumers' positive effect on the luxury goods market globally, Fort Street Studios has also enjoyed sales buoyed by this part of the world. 'Business has strengthened every year since we've been here. Last year was our strongest year ever and this year is equalling that.'
Davis and Provisor's fascination with China has been well documented: the artists visited the mainland silk capital Hangzhou in the late 1980s and, feeling a connection with the place, returned a few years later to work with the artisan weavers they found there. 'We made a jump and it changed our lives,' Davis says. Together they created luxurious hand-knotted, wild silk carpets using Dangdong silk from north China, which is durable, but still soft enough to make you want to roll about on them.
However, it is the beautiful, technically complex designs that immediately distinguish Fort Street Studio carpets. The patterns are based on original watercolour paintings by Davis and Provisor that are recreated in the silk weave. From the outset, Davis worked side by side with the dyers to create the exact shades they wanted. The yarns were then dyed in small batches to achieve varying degrees of colour intensity so the carpet actually looked like a watercolour.
An eight-year stint in Hong Kong to develop the business side followed before the husband-and-wife team moved back to New York to open a flagship showroom. They also sell from Los Angeles, London and Milan, all supplied by three factories in Hangzhou that employ about 100 people. But they maintain that the Hong Kong showroom is still the centre of the business.
