‘Beautiful, but durable’: couple’s design brief for seaside house produces light, airy Hong Kong family home with a coastal vibe
- A couple asked design studio Linehouse to make their 8,000 sq ft, 3-storey house with terrace into a coastal-inspired, bright and breezy home for their family
- Stone flooring and whitewashed walls added airiness and lifted the dark and heavy home interiors by inviting the outside in
Mercifully, no one was at home when Typhoon Mangkhut ploughed into the Southern district seaside residence that Georgina and John Boyle had bought a year earlier, destroying the first-floor main bedroom.
The couple had been living elsewhere at the time, unable to justify remodelling the Chung Hom Kok show house they had chosen not for its interior decor, which wasn’t to their taste, but for its location to the south on Hong Kong Island and its views. That intense 2018 storm provided the impetus.
The Boyles’ long search for a designer eventually led to Linehouse, whose design of the since-closed John Anthony dim sum restaurant in Causeway Bay they had admired.
The renovation, completed in late 2022, would be the first residential project in Hong Kong for Briar Hickling and Alex Mok, co-founders of the Shanghai, Hong Kong and New Zealand-based architecture and design practice.
Spread over three levels plus a rooftop and a basement car park, the detached house has about 8,000 sq ft (750 square metres) of living space with additional terraces and paved walkways around the perimeter.
The floor plan suited the couple, both business owners, who now have two young sons.
