Then & Now | Interior design in Hong Kong is a job for the wealthy and well-connected

Hong Kong offers many lucrative career opportunities that require few formal quali­fications. Interior design is one. This “profession” particularly suits personable-but-otherwise-unemploy­able scions of wealthy families; an off-the-peg design course, a generous sprinkling of dynastic money (and the social capital that goes with it) and influential contacts all help get a design portfolio up and running. After that, adesigner swiftly becomes as good – or otherwise – as their latest commis­sions. Design flair, combined with personal “push”, will do the rest.

A general lack of taste and genuine discrimination among a critical mass of people with large sums of money helps get people into the interior design trade. Bought-in authenticity makes a cookie-cutter flat into a “home” for those without the necessary creative background, or time, to craft their own.

In earlier times, interior design – much like landscaping, or what passed for it, in garden-challenged Hong Kong – was left to a project’s commissioning architects, often as an afterthought, and the results were predictable. An “instant” effect pre­vailed; nothing had time to mature or evolve. Like the people who ordered it all up, these interiors emerged from their chrysalis fully formed, with little to distinguish one from another.

June Scott, the widow of Walter Scott, Hong Kong’s deputy commissioner of police who was executed by the Japanese in 1943, was also the sister-in-law of post-war governor Sir Alexander Grantham. June and her sister, Maurine, had met their future husbands in the early 1920s, when both men were Cantonese-language students in Macau. June’s interior design career – in tandem with some profit­able local property speculation – was rumoured to have been helped (or, at least, not materi­ally harmed) by her family relationship with the governor. Open graft and petty peculation, generally confined to the lower levels of police and urban services officials, existed at the opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum.

In Hong Kong, “safe” taste has always been what sells the best. With little market for the avant garde, or even the particularly original, white walls have historically provided a comfortable backdrop for beige lives. Occasional unusual artworks, accent pieces, or artefacts collected on Asian travels, show some tentative flash of design originality. Artwork is included as an investment – or else some­­thing to break up an expanse of plastered, plain-painted wall. Books are notable for their absence, unless they are glossy, coffee-table design works, to be thumbed at odd moments, but otherwise unread.