Slow and low-key: bespoke Hong Kong shopping centre The Pedder Arcade adds a touch of London sophistication to the city

The fifth floor of the Pedder Building has emerged wearing a new look as The Pedder Arcade, the passion project of The Armoury menswear retailer’s Mark Cho

Cho and architect Katherine Wong looked to the shopping arcades of London for inspiration for its design. The result is remarkably airy and sophisticated

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Pedder Building’s The Pedder Arcade. Hong Kong is not lacking for shopping centres, but this one in the historic building in Central is unlike anything that came before. Photo: Edward Chan Tsz Fung

Published: 7:15am, 18 Nov 2023Updated: 7:34am, 18 Nov 2023

“I love this building, I’m sentimental about it,” says Mark Cho Ying-cheng one recent afternoon in Central’s Pedder Building on Hong Kong Island.

He is sitting on the fifth floor, to where The Armoury, the menswear store he co-founded with Alan See in 2010, has relocated from the third floor. Behind him, over cloth bales of sumptuous quality, Pino Luciano from Neapolitan tailors Orazio Luciano, who is in town for a trunk show, confers discreetly with male customers. (Women are catered for but the air is thick with male clubbiness.)

The Pedder Arcade is in Central’s Pedder Building on Hong Kong Island. Photo: Akita Daisuke

Each time the doors open, the sounds of sawing and hammering enter. The fifth floor of the Pedder Building – a grade one-listed edifice that dates back to 1924 – is also being cut and hand-stitched: soon it will emerge wearing a bespoke new look as The Pedder Arcade.

This made-to-measure redesign is Cho’s private passion and a post-pandemic project. He grew up in London, where he used to do real-estate work for HSBC and became fascinated by the city’s arcades: Burlington, Princes, Piccadilly … characterful clusters of small shops, gathered under one roof.

“I always thought it would be interesting to develop one of those arcades properly, to have a coherent tenant mix, to have it reconstructed sympathetically but with a retailer’s mindset and to recreate that in Hong Kong.”

For a while, he parked the idea while he attended to another retail dream. In 2008, he had been checking out new locations for WW Chan & Sons, a tailoring firm that had arrived from Shanghai in 1952, was based in Kowloon and wanted to shift to the island.

The Pedder Building is a grade one-listed building that dates back to 1924. Photo: Akita Daisuke