Leung's taste veered more towards the ornate. He cherished each visit to Seagram's Montreal headquarters, a "gorgeous Gothic castle" built in 1928, and he looked forward to his stays in grand hotels such as the Mayfair in London, or the chateau-style railway hotels in Canada.

"I said to my friends, 'I don't stay in hotels; I study hotels'," says Leung. "That was the beginning."

Earlier this year, Leung and mainland hotelier Liu Shaojun opened the Emperor Qianmen Hotel in Beijing, a luxury boutique operation designed by Adam Sokol and Dan Euser, who created the 9/11 memorial fountains in New York. Water flows from the rooftop pool into water features throughout the hotel, including an alley soaked by constant rain. The theme extends to the rooms - each is named with a Chinese character that contains the water radical.

From the outset, the goal was to create something unique.

"It's a design-led property," says Leung. "It's not glossy or glitzy, not expensive, but not cheap-looking and it uses earthy materials."

In part, the motivation was to create an antidote to typical Chinese hotel architecture.

"Chinese people like to put bathroom tiles on the exterior of a building and marble inside," says Leung. "Businessmen don't care as long as it makes money. They think design is a by-product."

But things are changing. Good design has become a way to build a strong identity and stand out from the crowd. In the past three years, dozens of design-forward restaurants and hotels have opened in Hong Kong, raising the stakes in an already competitive hospitality market. "There are a lot of people creating quite amazing value through design," says Edmund Lee, of the Hong Kong Design Centre.

While big corporations are now getting into the game - such as Swire's House Collection hotels, or the Miramar Group's Mira Moon - the trend is led by independent entrepreneurs such as Drawing Room Concepts founder Tony Cheng, who left a career in finance to dive into his true passion: food. In 2012, he recruited Joyce Wang to design Ammo and this summer the duo reunited for Vasco and Isono, two new restaurants inside PMQ.

"We told Joyce our vision and she came to me with a design that was visually stunning and unique," says Cheng. "I gave her free rein and I'm glad I did."

Ammo's brassy, munitions-inspired interior has won plaudits and several design awards. Vasco and Isono's space is similarly bold, with steel and wood juxtaposed against dazzling reflective materials.

In the case of restaurateur and hotelier Yenn Wong, acquiring a reputation for a design first was almost an accident. Three years after finishing her studies in marketing and economics in Australia, Wong was tasked with converting a Causeway Bay high-rise that her family had acquired into the JIA boutique hotel. She hired celebrated French designer Philippe Starck.

"I was highly sceptical ... he had a reputation for being hard to work with," she says.

However, the opposite proved to be true. "Now I understand why Philippe Starck is so sought after," she says.

Wong eventually sold JIA to fund her foray into the restaurant world, with eateries such as 208 Duecento Otto, 22 Ships, Ham & Sherry and Chachawan earning her plenty of acclaim, as much for their atmosphere as for their food. Wong was recently named restaurateur of the year in the 2014 awards.

"We start with the concept, then find suitable designers," she says. "We do respect them and that attracts talent. You can do what everyone else is doing and risk failing, or you can do something different and stand out."

That's certainly the credo of restaurant group Maximal Concepts, whose eateries such as Blue Butcher, Stockton, and Fish and Meat ooze chutzpah.

"Maximal's quite a hands-on company," says founder Malcolm Wood, who previously worked in finance.

"When we work with a designer it's right at the last minute," says co-director Matt Reid, Wood's schoolmate from England.

The starting point is always the space, whose particular qualities reflect the restaurant concept, menu and aesthetic. They often start by envisaging the restaurants as characters. "Blue Butcher is a male New Yorker with tattoos and a leather jacket, but Fish and Meat is his carefree sister with a long white dress who now lives in Europe," says Reid.

(Maximal's most recent restaurant, Mott 32, designed by Wang, is an exception to their usual design process. "It was the first time we relinquished control," says Wood.)

That kind of do-it-yourself approach to design might become more common in the future as rents, labour and construction costs rise, limiting the budget to hire big-name designers, says Tony Cheng. But that might not be a bad thing.

For Chachawan, a Thai eatery on Hollywood Road, Wong says her team "just kind of whipped it up, so it's funny when people say, 'Oh, the design is so great'. It's the concept that's important. It's not just 'Let's hire a world-class designer'."

Wong says she saves on rental by opening restaurants in more eccentric locations, which allows her to invest more in design. But it's hard to escape Hong Kong's voracious landlords for long. Alan Lo's Press Room restaurant, which launched his F&B career and pioneered the west end of Hollywood Road as a dining destination when it opened in 2006, closed in July after a new landlord bought the space and demanded a much higher rent.

Landlords aren't shy about making design demands, either. Another of Lo's restaurants, The Pawn, is undergoing a redesign, partly because it was a condition of its lease renewal. His chain of Classified restaurants will be gradually revamped, too, with a new concept to be unveiled at its 10th location in Repulse Bay, which opens this year.

One solution to the difficulties is to avoid Hong Kong entirely, which is what Leung and Liu have done. "We're eyeing developing economies," says Leung.

Another is to bank on designers who want to increase their exposure in Asia.

Lo and Wong recently hired Thomas Heatherwick to design a small hotel in Sham Shui Po, which Wong says is possible because the location is affordable and Heatherwick is giving them a good deal in exchange for the chance to work without corporate constraints.

Whatever the situation, it seems few entrepreneurs regret investing more in design. Lo, who trained as an architect but realised "it requires a certain discipline, which I didn't really have", includes a unique lighting fixture in each Classified, such as the one by Dutch firm Droog in its Star Street location.

Wong is fond of the "disciplined" space created for her latest restaurant, Aberdeen Street Social, by Shanghai architects Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu. Cheng raves about the private balcony room Wang created in Vasco and Isono's overheight space. Wood is particularly proud of the duck fridge he and Wang devised for Mott 32, which recreates the dry Beijing climate needed to make delicious Peking duck.

Reid compares the whole process to that of a barbecue. (Maximal is planning a beachside barbecue restaurant in Repulse Bay). "If you love to barbecue, you're not going to go out and get a gas grill," he says.

"If you really love it, you're researching the type of wood, the charcoal, the chips. That's the whole reason we started doing this. We love the whole creative experience."