Lifestyle brand WOHAbeing launches, its luxury hotel furniture can now be yours
If you have ever stayed at Singapore’s Park Royal hotel or Alila Villas Uluwatu in Bali and thought ‘I fancy those chairs’, you might be pleased to know that the designers have started their own lifestyle line, WOHAbeing
Architects Richard Hassell and Wong Mun Summ from the Singapore-based architectural practice WOHA have designed a number of luxury hotels in their time. They have also long had to fend off demands from guests who want to have various items from those hotels in their own homes.
“People kept asking, ‘Why isn’t our furniture for sale?’” Hassell says. “Guests at the hotels would get quite angry … They would say, ‘If you are not going to make [the furniture] we are going to get it copied.’”
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That is no longer necessary. Last week at the Maison & Objet Paris trade fair, the two architects – behind such landmarks as Bali’s clifftop resort Alila Villas Uluwatu and Singapore’s Park Royal hotel – launched WOHAbeing, a lifestyle brand selling furniture, rugs, lights, bathware and tableware.
Hassell and Wong both designed furniture early in their careers, but had focused on architecture since founding WOHA in 1994. They started thinking about establishing the spin-off brand after being named Maison & Objet’s Asia Designer of the Year 2017 in October last year and invited by the fair to hold an exhibition in Paris. Within nine months they had created six collections for their lifestyle line, with collaborators ranging from Wonderglass, a London-based lighting company that works with glass blowers in Venice, to Luzerne, a Singaporean company with a manufacturing base in Dehua, Fujian that makes “ethical bone china” without the bones.
Highlights from the launch of WOHAbeing in Paris included a round table composed of concentric wooden circles. Inspired by local Balinese design, the table, from the Ulu collection, has a shape similar to that of a Bronze Age Dong Son rain drum, with the layered base taking inspiration from colonettes in Hindu architecture.
