Annette Chu may have been educated as an architect in London, but it is her inspiring interior work that is making waves in the design world. After obtaining a Master of Arts from Cambridge and a Diploma from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, she worked in Brussels for three years on a children’s theatre project. Her return to Hong Kong coincided with the commission of a juice bar interior by a friend (the Pal-Eidoscope in Central), and since then she’s established her own small studio and in three short years has made her impression on a wide variety of projects, ranging from a residential house on The Peak, to the ground floor of a public housing project in Tuen Mun. She has also been described by Alvin Yip of HK Poly U’s School of Design as someone who “represents a new generation, one who does not follow but experiments with personality.” Andrea Yu caught up with Chu to find out how her education abroad has affected her as a designer, and the challenges that she faces working in Hong Kong.
 

You were educated in the UK since the age of 17. Have your experiences abroad enhanced you as a designer?
I think everyone has those chances of enlightenment. I appreciated my experience being away and this “enlightenment moment”. I think another experience was after I graduated from the AA and went to Brussels to work for one of my teachers. Living in Continental Europe was like a cultural shock for me. But you have this shock where you realise there are differences in culture, but that there are many different ways and possibilities of doing things.

Tell me more about your public housing project.
It was a community centre renovation on the ground floor. There were lots of constraints, and it was a relatively low budget project. Spatially, because of the way Hong Kong public housing was built in the 1960s, we had all these structural core walls we had to work with. But we wanted to give a new image to the centre. But the challenge was in disguising this rigid rhythm and creating a more fluid, open space.

And what about the house you designed on The Peak?
I think this one was more interesting. It was about how we could set pleasant surprises because they had been living in the same house for ten years. How can you recreate something that’s within a space that’s so familiar, but can be something new? Luckily the client was very open-minded so he was willing to let us test some ideas. The first thing we did was to swap his living space and dining space. The dining space is facing Hong Kong Harbour, so we thought this is where they should entertain their guests.

When you’re designing a new space, what is the first step?
The client has an agenda, and we try to write another small agenda on the side as a vehicle to brainstorm and to bring in other ideas. It’s a small script, thinking about what could happen in the space. From this script we start to put back the stage or the props inside the room. This is a way to help us not go directly into the design by drawing how the room and the space should look.

Are there any aspects of Hong Kong that inspire you as a designer?
We see lots of these metal folding gates in the traditional shops. What I like about them is that they are perforated with patterns and sometimes the name of the shop. But because they are folded in this way you can see something if you are walking in one direction but not necessarily in the opposite. Or you see something different. So we thought of a façade, as you walk along the corner, your perception also changes.

How do you maintain the traditional features of a building, but still update its appearance?
I’ve always thought that you cannot reconstruct something that doesn’t belong to your time. We try to respect the building, knowing that there are stories behind them. What we can do is add to them without trying to re-do something from the past. This is always my agenda. Whether you say it’s traditional Hong Kong, or new or old, I think it’s always a matter of studying what is there as an existing canvas. What I could add to it is something that belongs to our time.

Do you think that designers in Hong Kong face challenges that are different to designers in Europe?
In Europe, we had lots of time to research and slowly develop a project. Back in Hong Kong, I thought ‘wow, everything is so quick!’ I had to learn how to work very fast. But the advantage to this is that you get chances to build. I think as a young designer you’ve definitely got a lot of opportunities to implement your ideas when things are going very quick. But it’s about learning how to master this pace and control it.

Read the stories of the other up-and-coming stars in their respective fields

Michael Leung, product designer

Cary Lau, architect

Hung Lam, graphic designer