Interior design in Hong Kong is a job for the wealthy and well-connected
- In this city, it’s all about the connections, and it’s not uncommon to come across ‘interior designers’ with few formal qualifications
- ‘Safe’ taste and networking skills should be enough to keep the commissions rolling in
Hong Kong offers many lucrative career opportunities that require few formal qualifications. Interior design is one. This “profession” particularly suits personable-but-otherwise-unemployable scions of wealthy families; an off-the-peg design course, a generous sprinkling of dynastic money (and the social capital that goes with it) and influential contacts all help get a design portfolio up and running. After that, adesigner swiftly becomes as good – or otherwise – as their latest commissions. Design flair, combined with personal “push”, will do the rest.
A general lack of taste and genuine discrimination among a critical mass of people with large sums of money helps get people into the interior design trade. Bought-in authenticity makes a cookie-cutter flat into a “home” for those without the necessary creative background, or time, to craft their own.
In earlier times, interior design – much like landscaping, or what passed for it, in garden-challenged Hong Kong – was left to a project’s commissioning architects, often as an afterthought, and the results were predictable. An “instant” effect prevailed; nothing had time to mature or evolve. Like the people who ordered it all up, these interiors emerged from their chrysalis fully formed, with little to distinguish one from another.
June Scott, the widow of Walter Scott, Hong Kong’s deputy commissioner of police who was executed by the Japanese in 1943, was also the sister-in-law of post-war governor Sir Alexander Grantham. June and her sister, Maurine, had met their future husbands in the early 1920s, when both men were Cantonese-language students in Macau. June’s interior design career – in tandem with some profitable local property speculation – was rumoured to have been helped (or, at least, not materially harmed) by her family relationship with the governor. Open graft and petty peculation, generally confined to the lower levels of police and urban services officials, existed at the opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum.
Hong Kong interior designers: the real deal vs the impostors
In Hong Kong, “safe” taste has always been what sells the best. With little market for the avant garde, or even the particularly original, white walls have historically provided a comfortable backdrop for beige lives. Occasional unusual artworks, accent pieces, or artefacts collected on Asian travels, show some tentative flash of design originality. Artwork is included as an investment – or else something to break up an expanse of plastered, plain-painted wall. Books are notable for their absence, unless they are glossy, coffee-table design works, to be thumbed at odd moments, but otherwise unread.
Networking is an essential skill. A few fully-thronged housewarming parties wowing the guests of the clients who have just had their latest rental flat “done”, with the chic designer lurking in the background, wine glass in hand, smile firmly glazed on and funky name cards at the ready, will keep the phone ringing and the “me-too” commissions trundling in.
Before long, an unholy nexus exists between interior designers, the furniture, textiles and accessory shops, carpet salesmen and art galleries from whom they source, architects who pass on their design projects and the lifestyle journalists who – in return for access to industry gossip – provide regular advertorial plugs and a ready showcase for their work.
It was ever thus – anywhere in the world, in this particular field. The only significant local difference is how small and interconnected this circle actually is.
