Zen-like, minimalist and airy: Hong Kong home renovation channels grown-up calmness

With three architecturally attuned minds on the job, the transformation from family home to executive apartment in a 1960s mid-rise on The Peak, in Hong Kong’s priciest neighbourhood, was always going to be something special.

Andrew Yuen and designers Vincent Lim Chin-hwa and Elaine Manzi Lu all studied architecture – although in different years – at Cornell University, in the United States.

Yuen went on to join his family’s property business, while Lim and Lu set up their eponymous design practice, Lim + Lu, in Hong Kong. Although their future client had not known the couple at college, when he was considering designers for the project, completed in December 2023, it was their shared educational background that swayed him.

The school’s teachings take inspiration from the “less is more” approach of German-born American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, considered a pioneer of modernism. That sat well with Yuen’s penchant for Japanese culture espousing simplicity, Zen and wellness.

“Brainstorming the look and feel of the home, we gravitated towards this kind of aesthetic,” Lim says of the design’s clean lines and palette of natural materials such as wood, terrazzo, rattan and textured plaster.

However, simple is not always straightforward.