House, The Peak, Hong Kong
A villa of seven floors on the top of the highest hill of Hong Kong island, with stunning 360o views that overlook both the financial center’s skyscrapers and the spectacular panorama of the bay on the opposite side.
It’s a project built from scratch, from the architecture and the multi-level garden that wraps it entirely, to the interior spaces, mainly furnished with twentieth-century masterpieces. This villa represents the search for a different kind of luxury without ostentation. With an abundance of spaces to work on, the project was approached with simplicity in mind. At the same time, precious materials were used along with a meticulous attention to all the fine details.
A staircase along with a glass elevator connect the seven floors of the house. An alabaster wall delimits the façade toward the pool, allowing the sun’s rays to penetrate inside. Large ebony portals have the main function of emphasizing the relationship between the rooms, which are conceived as parts of a fluid space that’s made of different perspectives but with continuous visual connections. For the floors, we have chosen desert stone for almost the entire house: it has a light color with soft marbling that make it look like sand. Again, precious materials were used for the master bathroom, which is covered with brown lava stone, while black granite is a key material of the kitchen and the dining room.
Color has been used prudently, with hues ranging from sage and sugar paper to dark blue-black of walls and curtains.
From the exterior to the interior, a wall of intense purple stone crosses the villa. It starts from the outdoor pool, runs through the stairwell and the body of the elevator – a glass and bronze casket – until it wraps around the opposite side of the residence. The glass and bronze ceiling of the living room, designed to hide the complex air-conditioning system, is an irregular grid of opalescent tiles that overlooks the sitting area and visually connects the large living room with the study.
Almost all the furnishings are from the 50s, 60s and 70s, with a dominating presence: a few elements of great design were used to characterize the spaces without overloading them. Rare pieces by Gio Ponti, Ico Parisi, Paul Evans and Franco Albini, to name a few, with strong artworks and minimal Berber carpets complete the overall interior design.
