The world leading auction house has opened its new Asia-Pacific flagship space in Hong Kong. Monocle’s Asia editor, James Chambers, takes a tour with its interior designer, Betty Ng. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This is Monocle on Design Extra.
It's a short show to accompany our weekly program where we discuss everything from architecture and craft to furniture and fashion.
I'm Ailey Evans.
Today we head to Hong Kong where the world leading luxury auction house Christie's has opened its new Asia Pacific headquarters, the Henderson Building.
The sparkling new skyscraper is full of undulating curves and organic shapes.
Courtesy of Daha Hadid Architects.
This sets the stage for the four story flagship for Christie's.
The auction house's interiors are the work of Hong Kong Practice Collective.
Co founder of the firm Betty Ng gave a tour to Monaco's Asia editor James Chambers.
Betty began by sharing some of the challenges of designing in such an unusual architectural space.
During the design process, of course, we meet with a lot of stakeholders and a lot of them were very fascinated by Saha Hadi's design.
A lot of them wanted us to try to incorporate so called Saha Hadi elements in it.
But then we sort of responded by saying to be really respectful of the design is not to mimic, it is actually to let it shine.
So for example, the facade, the gigantic piece of curved glass facade of the Henderson is extremely special.
So what we have done is to create galleries that have this complete open view that you can really sense the curvature of the facade.
We focus more on creating a very practical and flexible fluid space for Christie's because they have moved from a very big exhibition hall to a small office floor play, comparatively speaking, to create similar exhibition and auctions.
So we focus more on creating flexibility and fluidity instead of focusing too much on the aesthetic of what the tower has already offered, let's say to Hong Kong.
And I think that beauty sometimes can be seen as a result of good design instead of something that is stylized.
In Hong Kong, there's this big shift among the big auction houses to move away from these two seasonal auctions a year where they usually rent out a big ballroom, to having their own physical spaces where they can have auctions throughout the year.
I mean, this is what Christie's is doing here.