Lofty living above it all

The Tregunter Towers development was initially built in the early 1990s, located at one of Hong Kong’s more prestigious addresses on the tree-lined Tregunter Path in the Lower Peak area. Boasting excellent facilities and large units, apartments have floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room and master bedroom.

This three-bedroom apartment (including one ensuite) has great city views, an open-plan living/dining space, maid’s room, fully equipped kitchen, a covered carpark and is in excellent decorative order.

The Tregunter estate has its own shuttle bus service providing easy access to business districts of Central and Wanchai, while a walking trail behind the development leads up to The Peak.

Facilities for all residents include a barbecue area, gym, outdoor swimming pool, tennis and squash court, children’s playground and indoor play area, sauna and steam rooms, aerobics room and golf driving range.

The open-plan lounge can accommodate exceptionally large furniture, such as this luxurious modular sofa for the whole family

When Tregunter Tower 3 was constructed in early 1990s, it was reportedly the tallest residential building in Asia at the time

A spacious entrance hallway provides space for amenities such as a bench, storage or umbrella stand

A fun and useful reading nook and desk unit provides the perfect spot for study and just enjoying the view

Wall panelling and a more traditional style of sink and cistern give this bathroom a personality of its own This ultra-modern shower room features under-sink storage for convenience

The monochromatic galley kitchen features high-end bespoke cabinets in glossy white, making the room feel spacious

His-and-hers double sinks add a touch of indulgence in the white-tiled bathroom

Area:2,361 s.f. (saleable) Location: Tregunter Tower 3, 14 Tregunter Path, Midlevels Central, Hong Kong Development completed: 1993

FEATURES

Covid-19 has taught us not to take anything for granted, so what does a post-pandemic future hold for the architecture and design industries?

Seats of inspiration

A series of public benches mark the 2021 edition of the London Festival of Architecture’s City Benches competition

Photography: Agnese Sanvito; courtesy of London Festival of Architecture | www.londonfestivalofarchitecture.org

In London, nine new public benches have been unveiled in Cheapside and for the first time, Aldgate, to mark the 2021 edition of the London Festival of Architecture’s City Benches competition with Cheapside Business Alliance and Aldgate Connect BID.

Designed by an emerging group of international and interdisciplinary architects and designers, these new benches will enliven the public realm across the City with their bold and imaginative designs, as London begins to welcome visitors, commuters and locals back to its streets.

This year’s collection of benches each offers a fresh new take on bringing people back together post-pandemic, providing safe, inviting environments for people to meet again and enjoy the capital with a creative approach to the Festival’s 2021 theme of care.

The designs hope to start a conversation on how we can better care for another and our built environment, from telling the forgotten stories of the local area through local landmarks and materials to supporting wellbeing by encouraging interaction and tackling sustainability by challenging views on littering and introducing more planting.

The final nine team and their designs were selected by an expert jury comprising Yigong Zhang (urban designer, Perkins & Will and co-chair, Aldgate BID Public Realm Steering Group); Charlotte Fletcher (chair, Cheapside Business Alliance board and senior director, CBRE); Laura King (director, KPF); Ellie Stathaki (architecture editor, Wallpaper*); and Rosa Rogina, (programme director, London Festival of Architecture & New London Architecture).

A Cuppa is one of the new benches by an emerging group of international and interdisciplinary architects and designers, intended to enliven the public realm across the City

It Takes Two

By 10F

As a tribute to the many inventive ways of occupying public furniture under the pandemic’s social-distancing restrictions, It Takes Two introduces a bend to the simple straight bench, creating a see-saw form that encourages dialogue between friends and strangers at either end, while maintaining physical distance. The bright blue recalls the historic colour of public amenities in the City of London, as found in the decommissioned police phone boxes that are still present in the area. The bench is made from Blue Dapple panels and 100 per cent recyclable materials.

www.instagram.com/10f.collective/

Quick Getaway

By Ex Architectures with Flu-or Arquitectura

Quick Getaway highlights travel as a form of care. Unfortunately, many of us have been deprived of this throughout the pandemic, which has been particularly hard for those in dense, urbanised cities such as London. The bench creates a holiday inspired oasis in the heart of the city, providing respite and triggering memories.

www.instagram.com/ex_architectures/ www.instagram.com/flu__or/

The Friendly Blob

By Jelly Collaborative

The pandemic has affected us in a multitude of ways, depriving us of the opportunity to meet up and socialise. The Friendly Blob is a proposal that motivates us to take care of not only our physical health, but our mental health as well. The Blob encourages people to meet while at a social distance and discover the public spaces that London has to offer. Taking inspiration from the dense history of the City of London, the bench acts as a miniature of the Square Mile, encouraging visitors to explore and learn about the architecture of the city.

www.instagram.com/jelly.collaborative/

Plant Yourself Here

By Lisa McDanell Studio

Benches are not very sociable spaces, typically facing outwards onto a busy road or away from a patch of grass. This project instead features two reclined seats that face each other, encouraging visitors to interact while maintaining social distance. The scooping form allows users to recline, enjoy the natural feeling of the cork, and look up at the sky while smelling surrounding greenery. The project aspires to be a light-hearted piece of street furniture that encourages children to play and provides a spot to have a short break in busy London life.

www.instagram.com/lisamcdstudio/

Do You Care About Your City?

By Nick Green

It’s been said that “London streets are paved with gold”, but aren’t they also gilded with the riches of the lunch break? This design takes fragments of litter — coffee cups, plastic bottles, takeaway packaging etc — and seals these within concrete and resin, elevating a litter strewn surface into terrazzo. By repurposing the detritus of the transient commuter city into a new object of permanence and status, Do You Care About Your City? is a reminder that litter is not temporary, and that while much of what we throw out every day is single-use, it still has a lasting impact on our streets and environment.

www.instagram.com/nd.green/

Conversation

By NVBL

Conversation pays homage to the history of material and exchange in the City of London. The design celebrates stone, craftsmanship and its natural architectural qualities while creating a place for connection, inspired by 19th century courting chairs. Conversation is a prototype to advocate the possibilities of developing stone design and technologies — rediscovering the use of stone structurally in architecture.

The bench is made solely from stone offcuts, carefully designed and handcrafted, highlighting its natural durability, structural integrity, sustainability and beauty. The stone pieces interlock in a specific order of assembly, connecting and supporting each other, and can be easily disassembled when required.

www.instagram.com/n_v_b_l/

Sobremesa

By Pebble Haus

Noticing the pressure of missing our friends and close ones during the lockdowns, Sobremesa provides a space for interaction where friends can catch up in the most natural way — over a cup of coffee. Sobremesa is the time spent relaxing after a meal to drink coffee, engaged in a relaxing conversation. The bench is made of jesmonite and coffee extracted from residual grounds sourced from local coffee shops, which have suffered a lot during the closure of the City.

www.instagram.com/pebble.haus/

Monuments to Mingling

By Sohanna Srinivasan

Monuments to Mingling is inspired by Aldgate’s rich architectural history and diverse contemporary identities. Each bench is a playful fusion of styles and motifs from a range of key community focal points, both past and present, including the East London Mosque, Aldgate pump and the historic Roman gate. The remixing of these elements hopes to encourage conversations across different communities and age groups. In addition, each bench celebrates a milestone in the UK government’s roadmap out of lockdown, the dates of which are engraved in Latin, in a nod to the area’s Roman past.

www.sohannasrinivasan.com

A Cuppa

By The Mad Hatters

From matcha to chai, chá or sencha; tea is more than just a drink. It involves a cathartic ceremony that unites people, cultures and communities. Reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland’s tea party, in which Alice’s fundamental concept of time is challenged, this bench invites everyone to pause and “have a cuppa”. The exaggerated scale of the delicate teacup and saucer, coupled with its playful patterns and bold colour scheme, brings a sense of light-hearted bliss to the City. Crowned with lush planting which alludes to the essential elements of tea, the bench injects an additional touch of nature to its setting.

www.instagram.com/themadhatters.co/

A huge 64 per cent of staff surveyed by Hames Sharley reported focused work being easier at home, with 30 per cent requesting dedicated high focus spaces in the workplace

What can the workplace learn from lockdown?

In this case study, Australian design practice Hames Sharley surveyed all staff across its six studios to investigate the impact of working from home and the lessons that could be translated back into the workplace

Photography: © Hames Sharley

Against the current background of outbreaks, snap lockdowns, constant travel uncertainty and a slowly developing vaccine programme, workers around the world, are trying to return to a version of normal. ‘Normal’ and ‘a new normal’ are debatable tags; a quest for certainty and personal control might be the crux of a very real ambition intrinsically linked to mental wellbeing.

There has been a huge development in the collective corporate understanding of health and wellbeing. Exercise used to be entirely separate to work, while mindfulness was unheard of.

Established in 1976, Hames Sharley, with studios in Adelaide, Brisbane, Darwin, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney, boasts multi-award-winning projects across architecture, interior design, urban design, planning, and landscape design. The global coronavirus pandemic has resulted in huge changes in working conditions for many millions across the world, sparking Hames Sharley’s decision to look at the impact on its own staff.

The new normal

An increasingly acknowledged — and far harder to define — area is mental health and the sense of belonging in the current workplace. Corporate cultures have been severely challenged as the Covid-19 experience has accelerated the trajectory of many growing concerns. These include the blurring of home and work, the support of and connection to family, the balance of focus and collaboration and the slow recognition and inclusion of introvert personalities.

Presence-driven cultures have led to expectations of longer productive work hours and anytime/anywhere technologies have driven that expectation of accessibility and availability into every evening dinner and straight through the domestic front door.

For some, working at home at odd hours led to working at home in usual hours and it had tangible benefits. It allowed focus away from noisy open-plan offices. It saved time when balancing the normal work location with any domestic appointment. It allowed parents to stretch across childcare and work and could be extremely convenient.

However, not every company has supported this shift, which depends on mutual trust and output-based performance metrics.

Forty-three per cent of respondents suggested planting or outdoor space should be incorporated to a work environment, while 35 per cent requested informal lounge areas

Designing for diversity

Parallel to this was growth in corporate understanding of gender diversity and the need to encourage and empower working mothers (and parents/carers generally) returning to work with a steady increase in parents’ rooms to nurse babies. That became family rooms to entertain young children for an unexpected meeting, that became after school clubs and spaces to protect dependent elderly relatives temporarily.

Staying socially connected

Covid-19 took these new and sometimes unusual moves and rocketed them into an accepted necessity. For many, locations of work changed, the physical threshold between work and home evaporated, for some work/life had the potential to be more structured as the incidental meeting was dead, high focus was much easier or much harder depending on your living arrangements and, importantly, the introverts flourished.

There’s a caveat that those introverts were generally already part of an organisation and had a degree of tenure. Also, while so many companies struggled with expectations of cultural connection and worked so hard to create informal meeting opportunities through every online social event imaginable, these were still structured, booked interactions and tacitly avoidable.

What ‘work from home’ has done to the workplace

Hames Sharley surveyed all staff to investigate the impact of working from home and the lessons that could be translated back into the workplace.

Surprisingly, 46 per cent of respondents reported a positive impact in their connection to the organisation while working from home, but for 22 per cent, remote working to have a negative impact on cultural connection. The remaining 32 per cent felt there had been little difference.

The reasons were varied: there was acknowledgement of overt informal meeting opportunities and great communication technology adoption during lockdowns.

Frustrations of working from home included lack of printing facilities, fluctuating VPN connection speeds and the presence of children. In a statistic slightly at odds with the high positivity around organisational connection, 43 per cent reported that they missed the immediacy of physical team connection.

Understandably, the combination of these statistics suggests that being left alone by others was seen positively, but the inability to immediately communicate with others on demand was frustrating. This balance of accessibility and productivity between an individual and a team is an ongoing challenge throughout every organisation.

Positives that could be translated back to the workplace all fell under the banner of ‘choice’. This ranged from individual control of lighting, temperature, noise and humidity to the selection of vastly different work settings to support different activities. Forty-three per cent of respondents suggested planting or outdoor space should be incorporated to a work environment, while 35 per cent requested informal lounge areas.

A huge 64 per cent reported focused work being easier at home and this translated to 30 per cent requesting dedicated high focus spaces in the workplace. In a demographic overlay, there was no correlation between the ability to focus and having children at home where social commentary suggests otherwise. Similarly, there was no correlation between age and a positive or negative cultural connection to organisation.

Feedback suggests a workplace should provide opportunities for socialising and relaxation time between periods of work through the day, such as a gym

The preferred way to work

The general lack of distraction, ability to move between alternative environments, access to nature and more structured communication have all come through as positive attributes of working from home.

The survey statistics suggest that this choice and focus outweighed the irritation of not being able to immediately turn to adjacent colleagues and this is obviously the inverse of the positively rated limited distraction. Some of the survey commentary was in response to a previous poorly-supported open plan environment, and offers a counterpoint to the view of open plan working being great for communication and informal sharing of knowledge and ideas.

Open plan isn’t for everyone or for every task; it certainly isn’t a high focus environment and it can be deeply challenging for introverts. The survey data suggested that a far greater range of alternative work settings was preferred and this plays to the growing move towards agility-based Activity Based Working models where staff choose their work setting, location, who they might be near and in larger workplaces that can develop into areas of different humidity and temperature.

The survey data suggested that a far greater range of alternative work settings was preferred

A blurring of boundaries

There was mixed feedback regarding delineation of work and family/social time. For some, respondents juggling both at home was a challenge with working time stretching and a feeling of not being able to escape tasks for a relaxing evening. There was feedback regarding wanting to not have to work at the family dining table.

A repeated positive came from those with a home office or converted spare bedroom that for them was their place of work, entirely separate from their lounge, kitchen or garden and the ability to frequently move from one to the other was hugely appreciated.

This feedback suggests that a workplace could have more than just alternative work settings but completely different environments with a high degree of separation between them to empower genuinely social relaxation time between periods of work through the day.

A new perspective

Overall choice and individual control of environment remained overarching themes. The research proved the need for spaces to support different tasks and different personalities, perhaps far more separate and different in terms of environment than they have ever been before, balancing focus and collaboration, increasing accessible outdoor space and plants, lots of plants.

The full report can be viewed at www.hamessharley.com.au

TRAVEL

&SHOWS

After a year of cancellations, the travel and trade show industries are picking up again with cautious optimism for a return to better times.