Inside Hong Kong-raised interior designer’s hip east London home

It’s no surprise that Hong Kong-bred, London-based architect and interior designer Sharon Toong wanted to live in the buzzing Dalston district. Filled with trendy restaurants and bars, the area is so famous as a haunt of young creatives that even hipster magazine Vice dubbed it “London’s coolest hangout”.

But the very things about Dalston that appealed to Toong – the creative community and the nightlife – also make it a difficult place in which to live. “It’s busy all the time, day and night,” says Toong, who grew up in Mid-Levels. “So I really wanted my house to be a sanctuary, away from all the hustle and bustle.”

Toong thought finding a quiet bolt-hole in Dalston would be a challenge, but one of the first properties she saw when she began house hunting in 2014, 13 years after moving to Britain, was a two-bedroom, two-storey house on a quiet private road. Far enough from the neighbourhood’s noisy bars yet close to the nearest train station, the house was a hidden gem.

Another plus point was that the 840 sq ft property needed only limited structural changes. Toong removed two awkward walls of glass bricks that divided the living room and kitchen to make the ground-floor space open plan. Upstairs, she enlarged the two bed­rooms by moving the bathroom from a prime corner position to sit between the rooms.

Toong wanted her small garden to pay tribute to Dalston, so decided to commission an artist to paint a large, graffiti-style mural. After plenty of research, Toong fell in love with the work of Bristol-based illustrator Andy Council. “He’s famous for doing cityscapes in the shape of dinosaurs,” Toong says. “My husband [Maciej Woroniecki] and I both trained as architects, so we thought that was really cool.”