Design Anthology, Asia Pacific Edition #15

Welcome to Issue 15 of Design Anthology, our annual year-end edition with a distinctively international flavour. The team has rounded up features that cross borders as far and as wide as Bali, Niseko, Singapore, Seoul and the Pearl River Delta for our Dossier reportage, while I’ve hand-picked my edits from the autumn edition of Maison&Objet Paris for our Fiera section. Along with our usual line-up of new hotel openings, we bring you the story behind the long-awaited renovation of the iconic Hôtel de Crillon, a Rosewood Hotel in Paris, plus the stunning Killiehuntly Farmhouse & Cottage, an escape nestled deep in the evocative landscape of the Scottish Cairngorms. For Vernissage, we bring you an assemblage of features on galleries, artists and curators from Kuala Lumpur to Sydney and Japan to…

Factory A, Hong Kong In a former factory building in the rapidly gentrifying Wong Chuk Hang neighbourhood on Hong Kong’s south side, a new and impressive space has opened up housing get.give, an independent retailer and consultancy, alongside Danish lifestyle brand Menu. United by an ethos of living well, the duo have joined forces in a singular space called Factory A. Keep an eye out for their programme of interesting events. menu .as / get-give.co Molteni&C / DADA, Hong Kong Lifestyle furniture brand Molteni&C and designer kitchen brand Dada have joined forces with a new flagship showroom in Central, Hong Kong. Set in the iconic Bank of America Tower, the store’s focus is given to clean, minimal lines that echo the products, while sculptural lighting by Bocci provides a…

Louis Jobst UK-based architecture-trained designer Louis Jobst has created a triptych of lighting using LEDs. While the light source may be high-tech, the materials in the Monument Lamps (seen right) are anything but, heavily featuring Jobst’s favoured robust natural elements. The hand-blown glass diffusers seem to almost float atop their monolithic bases, made from marble, travertine or granite on a steel base. Each piece is uniquely handmade. louisjobst. com Daniel Boddam Architect and designer Daniel Boddam travelled extensively before settling in Sydney to start his own practice, and his new Monument furniture collection is inspired by the monumental architecture he encountered during his adventures. Each piece embodies Boddam’s ethos of considered simplicity and has been designed with timelessness in mind. The collection consists of a coffee table, dining table,…

Making House: Designers at Home by Dominic Bradbury, photography by Richard Powers (Rizzoli) The most recent title by design documenters Dominic Bradbury and Richard Powers, Making House: Designers at Home explores the rare and often unseen world inside designers’ minds as expressed in their most honest and intimate work — their own homes. The book covers designers from a diverse array of fields such as interiors, product, textiles and architecture, and from an equally wide range of environments from Manhattan to a Moroccan village and a farmhouse in Brazil. For the designers who live in them, the homes act as spaces for experimentation and exploration of new and novel ideas — laboratories of sorts, without the limitations of timelines and budgets involved in client-driven projects. Perhaps what makes these homes…

Too much talk, not enough action. Some would say that’s the problem with too many design initiatives in Hong Kong — and it’s one of the reasons Marisa Yiu decided to set up Design Trust, along with her fellow board members from Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design. Established in 2006 with support from the Hong Kong Design Centre, HKAoD aims to promote creativity through youth education and public events like the annual deTour festival. Yiu joined the group when she and her partner Eric Schuldrenfrei moved their design practice ESKYIU from New York to Hong Kong in 2007. But she increasingly felt that Hong Kong needed more than just design education; it needed design that made a difference. ‘We did a lot with Ambassadors but it wasn’t really making critical…

Ministry of Design’s works are characterised by spectacle and wit — qualities perfectly suited to the design of creative offices and boutique hotels, which comprise much of the Singapore firm’s portfolio. But what about a laboratory for robotics? This was a challenge the multidisciplinary design firm faced and gamely welcomed when hired by the Robotics Application Centre of Excellence to design a display and education space. A collaboration between Nanyang Technological University and local precision engineering company PBA Group, the lab aims to advance the use of automated robotics within existing manufacturing industries in Singapore to drive Industry 4.0 change. Located in Yishun Industrial Park, it holds robotics courses at various levels for everyone from policymakers to business owners. A mysterious blackened lift lobby splayed with white stripes provides an…