DESIGN PROFILE
Interior designer Joyce Wang
if she hadn’t become an interior designer, Joyce Wang thinks she would probably have gone into film. ‘I’ve always been jealous of how a good film can inspire people to talk about it afterwards – take Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which has so much layering and hidden clues,’ she says. ‘My hope with our interiors is that people will want to re-experience them, to get a bit more out of them on each visit.’
As a rising star in hospitality design, with a global portfolio of luxury restaurants and hotels, Joyce has clearly mastered her own art of storytelling. One of her latest projects for exclusive London members’ club, The Arts Club, saw Joyce and her team reimagining the newly expanded Japanese restaurant Kyubi. ‘It was fascinating to marry the backdrop of a traditional Georgian townhouse with our interpretation of the Meiji period, when Japan embraced Western influences for the first time,’ notes Joyce, whose richly textured scheme fuses traditional Japanese arts and crafts with colonial and mid-century references.
Her studio was also tasked with designing the club’s new cigar lounge Oscuro. ‘Part of our brief was to appeal to non-cigar smokers as well, so we wanted to create a freshness you wouldn’t normally associate with a cigar lounge,’ she says of the space, which unites tobacco-hued timbers with exuberant florals; the adjoining terrace, meanwhile, f launts a lush living wall.
Joyce, who grew up in Hong Kong before attending boarding school in the UK, studied architecture and materials science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then took a masters in architecture and interiors at the Royal College of Art. She envisaged a career in architecture, but helping a friend design the interior of a cupcake shop in Hong Kong proved to be a light-bulb moment. ‘I didn’t know how much I would love interior design,’ says Joyce. ‘I realised that my yearning was to work with fabrics and textures.’
Joyce set up her eponymous studio in Hong Kong in 2011, and it was projects such as Italian-japanese
Designing an interior is a bit like Pygmalion – you know the end result is there and you chip away until it comes to life
fusion restaurant AMMO in Hong Kong – where she took inspiration from the 1965 film noir Alphaville – and boutique hotel The Hollywood Roosevelt in Los Angeles that really put her on the map. Today, she has studios in both Hong Kong and London, with a 10-strong team in each. ‘There is definitely a crosspollination between the two teams; I think that we get the best out of both cities,’ says Joyce, who lives with her architect husband and their three small children in Hong Kong but also has a base in London. ‘Our two homes are entirely different: the London property is a bit like a Hobbit house with decorative drapes, lots of cushions and a really rustic farmhouse table, while our home in Hong Kong feels more like a gallery space, with a white resin floor throughout.’
With sustainability the word on everyone’s lips, the hospitality industry has seen some key changes over recent years. ‘It’s a hugely important factor, especially with the bigger hotel projects,’ affirms Joyce. ‘We are often briefed to source all the materials within a certain-mile radius and it feels almost passé now to think of using animal products, such as shagreen or feathers. I think this has spawned a new creativity – we will look at, say, coconut husks or straw marquetry for an interesting finish. It’s all about working with the people who have the foresight: for some of the furniture in our studio, we approached the designer Sebastian Cox who uses fallen wood from local forests.’
Last year saw Joyce branching out into product design with Flint, a collection of terrazzo objects and furniture launched at the London Design Festival. ‘I’ve always worked with terrazzo. There’s a general perception – particularly in places like Hong Kong where it was used a lot in tenement housing – that it is a pedestrian material, but I like to challenge that and show how beautiful and sculptural it can be. And, of course, it is inherently sustainable,’ she explains.
With current design projects including luxury hotels in Melbourne and San Francisco, plus residential work in Burgundy – ‘It’s fun to sometimes work on a home as it puts you in a very different headspace’– this talented storyteller is busy crafting brand new narratives. ‘For me, designing an interior is a bit like Pygmalion,’ observes Joyce. ‘You know the end result is there and you just have to keep chipping away at it until it comes to life.’