RESIDE WINTER 2022
ARCHITECTURE THAT CONVEYS THE SPIRIT OF A PLACE HONG KONG - BASED ARCHITECT NELSON CHOW ON THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT AND CREATING AN EXPERIENCE Hong Kong-based architect Chow, 2021 was a busy year. FHisorNelson award-winning studio, NC Design
space-themed Faye, the sky-high club you designed that opened in April 2021 in Hong Kong’s Lan Kwai Fong district?
You’re known for using architecture to tell stories. What’s the story behind the
One of your other 2021 projects— Memento, the pop-up for Louis Vuitton’s Objets Nomades collection of travelinspired furniture—transformed two floors of the historic Pedder Building in Hong Kong into an imaginary seaside mansion. What inspired that design?
& Architecture Ltd., completed several high-profile projects that made global headlines. Chow, who was raised in Hong Kong and Canada, has a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Waterloo in Canada but also a menswear tailoring certificate from ew York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. Before starting his own studio, he worked in the ew ork City o ce of the international design and concept firm Avro , then the Edge Design Institute in Hong Kong. His innovative residential and commercial spaces offer sophisticated references to pop culture and history and also act as experiential entertainment. Here, he talks about his inspirations and ideas, and what he’s planning next.
Nelson Chow, shown above, designed Faye, an outer-space-themed nightclub, shown at top, that opened in 2021 in Hong Kong.
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Faye was inspired by Space Carnival, which is in the penthouse of the California Tower, an iconic skyscraper in Lan Kwai Fong. Its predecessor, Volar, had been an institution in the district for over a decade. It had carnival ponies, which people would always take photos with. The owner really wanted to bring that back. So that’s how the carnival theme started. Given its location at the penthouse and the panoramic view of the city, we wanted to reinterpret a carnival and give it a futuristic twist and imagined it as a spaceship. This kind of story gives meaning to any design.
