ANOTHER DESIGN
LEGENDARY INTERVIEW
Design Legends ("DL") had the distinct honour to interview legendary designer ANOTHER DESIGN ("AD") for their original perspective and innovative approach to design as well as their creative lifestyle, we are very pleased to share our interview with our distinguished readers.
DL: Could you please tell us a bit about your design background and education?
AD : My formation as a luxury interior architect began in Hong Kong — a city whose spatial intensity is, I think, unmatched anywhere in the world, and whose density forced an early, almost involuntary understanding of what built environments do to the human body and mind. I studied at the University for the Creative Arts in the United Kingdom, where formal education gave structure to an intuition already developed through years of close observation in one of the world's most compressed urban landscapes. Returning to Hong Kong, I spent years in commercial and retail practice — demanding, fast-paced, commercially rigorous — and it was there that the discipline underlying everything I have done since was forged. The deepest lesson of that period is also the simplest: design is not what you add, but what you understand well enough to remove. That principle has stayed with me through every subsequent project, and it remains the first thing I try to remember whenever I enter a new space for the first time.
DL: What motivates you to design in general, why did you become a designer?
AD : I became a designer because I could not stop noticing space — the way a threshold changes your breathing, the way light pooling against cold stone produces a fundamentally different emotional state than light flooding a room. This was not a career choice so much as an acknowledgment of a perceptual disposition I already possessed. What continues to motivate me, more than two decades into the practice, is the irreducible human stakes of interior design: the spaces I create are the environments in which people live their actual lives — where they wake, recover, think, grieve, and celebrate. No other creative discipline operates at this intimacy of scale across this length of time. The responsibility is considerable, and I find it motivating rather than paralyzing.
DL: Did you choose to become a designer, or you were forced to become one?
AD : Neither, precisely. I was drawn into design the way water finds its gradient — not by compulsion, but by nature. Growing up in Hong Kong, surrounded by some of the most spatially layered environments on earth, my response was not anxiety but curiosity: an instinct to understand how these environments worked and how they might work differently. In conversation with the architect Ian Ritchie at the BLT Design Awards in Basel, he described his own formation in similar terms — not a deliberate career decision, but the gradual recognition that one's sensibility was already architectural. That resonated. The professional choice, when it came, ratified something that was already true. I think that is the honest account for most designers who go on to produce serious work: the vocation precedes the decision.
DL: What should young designers do to become a design legend like you?
AD : The first and most important thing is to treat every project as if it were the most significant commission you have ever received — because for the person who gave it to you, it is. The designer who reserves full attention for prestigious commissions will produce impressive work occasionally and indifferent work habitually. The designer who brings the same quality of listening, thinking, and execution to every project, regardless of scale or budget, will develop a practice of genuine depth. The second thing: stop designing for the portfolio and start designing for the space. The portfolio is a consequence; the space is the work. Third: cultivate your references outside of design — in music, in literature, in philosophy, in the natural world. The structural principles that govern my practice did not come from studying other interiors. They came from paying close attention to how a well-composed piece of music manages the relationship between tension and resolution, density and silence. Ian Ritchie put the broader principle well in Basel: simplicity is what remains after you have removed everything that does not matter. Building the confidence to know what matters takes years of exactly that kind of broad, disciplined attention.
DL: What distinguishes between a good designer and a great designer?
AD : A good designer sees the room and makes it better. A great designer sees through the room to the life it is intended to contain — and designs for that life, not for the room. The distinction is not technical but philosophical: it concerns how much of the visual surface the designer is willing to set aside in order to reach the spatial and experiential logic beneath it. Ian Ritchie put this precisely in Basel: the architecture of the Elisabethenkirche is not the stone — it is the volume the stone contains. The same principle holds at the intimate scale of a bedroom or a corridor: the design is not the materials, not the finishes, not the furniture — it is the quality of inhabited time those elements make possible. The other distinction I would name is temporal. Great designers think in decades. They are producing assets that should age with dignity, reveal new qualities over time, and serve the people who inhabit them more fully as those people grow into them. That orientation requires a willingness to subordinate the immediate impression to the long-term experience — a form of professional patience that not every designer is willing to practice.
DL: What makes a good design a really good design, how do you evaluate good design?
AD : Good design becomes truly good design when it operates successfully across three temporal registers simultaneously. In the immediate register, it must produce its intended experiential effect from first encounter — the spatial pause, the emotional landing, the deceleration. In the medium-term register, it must perform reliably across the full range of use conditions: different times of day, different seasons, different emotional states of its occupants. In the long-term register — the one I consider most consequential — it must age with dignity, developing patina rather than obsolescence. Ritchie and I arrived at the same conclusion from opposite scales of practice: rooms and buildings that seal their surfaces feel lifeless, because they have foreclosed the possibility of evolution. The best materials have memory. They respond to use, to time, to the particular quality of light in a given place, and they are made more interesting by that response. I evaluate design primarily by asking: will this be better in ten years than it is today? If the answer is yes, the fundamentals are right.
DL: What is the value of good design? Why should everyone invest in good design?
AD : The value of good design is most legible when it is absent. A poorly designed environment — excessive visual complexity, misaligned sight lines, materials that have no depth beyond their initial surface — produces a chronic low-grade cognitive fatigue that its occupants rarely attribute correctly to the space itself. They experience it as restlessness, as difficulty concentrating, as the vague sense that they cannot fully decompress at home. Good design removes those invisible frictions. In my 2026 design thesis, I argued that clarity of line is not merely an aesthetic preference but an asset strategy: the more restrained the spatial language, the longer the space remains engaging, and the lower the lifecycle costs of maintenance and replacement. For residential clients, I offer a simpler formulation: in five years, you will replace the sofa and perhaps the art. But the quality of light grazing a limestone wall at dusk — that is permanent. That is the soul of the property. Invest there first, and everything else follows.
DL: What is your secret recipe of success in design, what is your secret ingredient?
AD : The recipe has four ingredients that I outlined explicitly in my 2026 essay for Hong Kong Economic Journal Monthly: linearity, rhythm, tactility, and temperament. Linearity establishes spatial order — clean, continuous, restrained lines that allow the eye to settle and the mind to decompress. Rhythm governs pace — the distance between light sources, the cadence of thresholds, the arc of natural light across material surfaces across the course of a day. Tactility communicates at the register of the body rather than the eye: the directional quality of matte timber veneer, the fine-grained haze of certain limestones, the controlled luster of hand-finished leather. Temperament is the coherent atmospheric quality that emerges when the first three are integrated with sufficient discipline — when multiple spaces within a project share not a visual style but a spatial language. But the secret beneath all four is this: every project must begin from a genuine willingness to not-know — to resist the pull of what has worked before and allow this particular space, this particular client, and the particular life the space will contain to determine what the answer should be. Designers who arrive at a first meeting with formed ideas are not solving the problem; they are projecting a previous solution onto a new situation. The results are always visible, and never convincing.
DL: How could people improve themselves to be better designers, what did you do?
AD : I developed primarily through the discipline of non-instrumental attention — the regular practice of encountering spaces, objects, music, and natural environments with no agenda other than close observation. Not studying them for ideas to appropriate, but attending carefully to how they produce their effects. My 2026 design manifesto opened with the image of a horse standing still in a wet meadow at dawn: not dramatic, not performative, but possessed of a deep structural order that produces calm in the observer. That image came from years of paying that kind of attention to the world beyond design. The practical instrument of this discipline is the sketchbook — not for recording visual ideas, but for tracking observations, questions, and the slow emergence of principles. The designers whose work endures across decades are, without exception, systematic observers of the world outside their own discipline. The narrowly trained designer produces technically competent work. The broadly curious designer produces work that people want to inhabit for the rest of their lives.
DL: How do you define design, what is design for you?
AD : Design is the disciplined imposition of spatial, temporal, and emotional order on human experience — in service of life, not in service of appearance. The most honest definition I have found is a negative one: design is the process of removing everything that does not belong until what remains could not be otherwise. That standard is harder to meet than any positive definition, because it requires the designer to suppress the instinct to add and to develop instead the intelligence to subtract. In a manifesto I published in Hong Kong Economic Journal Monthly in early 2026, I proposed that the defining challenge for contemporary interior design is not stylistic innovation but what I called spatial deceleration — the capacity of a well-conceived environment to slow the cognitive and emotional tempo of its occupants. A space that achieves this does not announce itself. It disappears into the life it was made for. That disappearance is the standard I design
DL: What’s your ultimate goal as a designer?
AD : To produce work that makes people quiet. Not impressed, not stimulated, not photographed — quiet. There is a quality in the best spaces I have inhabited, and in the best designs I have encountered at every scale, of arrested attention: the body and mind settling simultaneously into a state of receptive stillness. It is not emptiness — the room is fully present, the materials are vivid, the light is precise — but the self-consciousness of being in a designed space dissolves, and what remains is simply the experience of being in a place that feels exactly right. Achieving that quality requires the suppression of the designer's ego rather than its expression. The goal is not to make spaces that announce their authorship but spaces that disappear into life — that become so attuned to the rhythms and needs of the people who inhabit them that they cease to be experienced as design and begin to be experienced as home. That disappearance is the highest achievement I know of in this discipline, and the one most resistant to the forces of trend, fashion, and professional ambition.
DL: How does design help create a better society?
AD : Design shapes the sensory and emotional conditions of daily life at a scale and intimacy that no other cultural practice can match. In the urban contexts I work in most frequently — Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, London — the psychological cost of high-density, high-tempo city life is measurable and significant. In my 2026 HKEJ essay, I proposed that different cities require different spatial responses: Hong Kong needs slowness because the city is already maximally compressed; Shanghai needs immersive spatial narrative because its inhabitants are willing to let space participate in their story; Beijing needs human-scale restraint within its monumental contexts, returning the body's sense of proportion to spaces that can otherwise overwhelm it. These are not aesthetic preferences but social diagnoses — and the designer who understands them can create environments that genuinely repair, restore, and reorient the people who inhabit them. Design's contribution to a better society is not made through symbolic gesture or cultural statement. It is made through the sustained, daily, physical improvement of lived experience — one room, one threshold, one quality of light at a time.
DL: Where do you think the design field is headed next?
AD : The field is converging on what I would call durational value — a design philosophy organized around longevity, material integrity, and experiential depth rather than stylistic novelty. This is not nostalgia for a pre-modern craft tradition; it is a rational response to the economic and cultural conditions of the current moment. In periods of volatility and uncertainty, the most resilient design proposition is always the one built on timeless principles: clarity of spatial logic, coherence of atmospheric language, depth of material experience. The European hospitality industry's current turn toward what practitioners are calling Soft Luxury — replacing surface spectacle with material depth, investing in thickness rather than display — is the commercial manifestation of a broader cultural shift. The future belongs to practitioners who can deliver that depth with discipline and without sentimentality. The market is already asking the right question: not what does this look like, but how will this age. That question is the beginning of serious design.
DL: How long does it take you to finalize a design project?
AD : As long as it requires, and not a day less — though I recognize this is more satisfying as a philosophical position than as a project timeline. The Battersea Power Station penthouse, my most cited project, required fifteen months from initial concept through completion: a complete reconfiguration of the interior architecture, bespoke fabrication with Italian artisans, and the integration of feng shui principles governing not just spatial layout but the energetic logic of the entire apartment. That timeline was not inefficiency; it was the minimum time within which the research, conceptual development, spatial design, custom fabrication, and site coordination the project demanded could be properly conducted. Design that is artificially compressed reveals the compression in its final form. The cheap option looks perfect at handover and feels dated in five years. Quality — material, spatial, conceptual quality — does not depreciate. It compounds. That is not a marketing claim; it is a description of how time interacts with honest materials and rigorous design.
DL: When you have a new design project, where do you start?
AD : I start by resisting the temptation to design. The most common error in our profession is beginning with form before the problem is understood — arriving at a first meeting with developed aesthetic ideas rather than genuinely open questions. What I find most valuable is not accumulated knowledge but accumulated capacity for attention: the ability to encounter each new site, each new client, and each new brief with the quality of observation that the beginner brings to their first project. My actual starting point is immersion — sustained observation of the site at different times of day and in different light conditions, close attention to how clients describe their daily life and, equally, to what they choose not to say, and a period of research into the cultural and historical context of the space. From that genuine engagement, I work toward what I call the concept: not a mood board or a material palette, but a single disciplined organizing principle that will govern every subsequent decision. That principle cannot be found before the listening. It can only be found through it.
DL: What is your life motto as a designer?
AD : Put sound into reputation; put heat into endurance; put the moment into years. This formulation — which I used to close my 2026 essay in Hong Kong Economic Journal Monthly — is not originally a design motto but a life position: a rejection of the economy of spectacle in favor of the economy of permanence. In design terms, it means choosing the surface that will develop a richer patina over the one that photographs better today; choosing the spatial logic that will serve the inhabitant's life in twenty years over the one that wins awards this season; choosing the material that ages with dignity over the one that impresses on first encounter. I find this orientation most clearly expressed in the natural world — in anything that has developed its character through sustained exposure to time and use: a worn threshold, a patinated bronze handle, stone that has been touched by generations. These things are beautiful not despite their age but because of it. That is the standard I hold my work to.
DL: Do you think design sets the trends or trends set the designs?
AD : Neither, in the work I most respect. The designer who sets trends is still in a relationship with the market's appetite — still oriented toward the external validation of novelty. The designer whose work is set by trends is, obviously, a follower. The third position — the one I aspire to — is indifference to both. This is not arrogance but a form of discipline: the decision to evaluate every design choice against the standard of durational value rather than contemporary approval. Does this material choice serve the space in twenty years, or only in the photograph taken at handover? Does this spatial decision support the specific life this client actually lives, or does it position the project within a recognizable current aesthetic? The designers whose work endures across decades — whose rooms remain compelling and livable long after the moment of their creation has passed — are almost always those who found a way to operate outside the trend cycle entirely, not by rejecting it but by having a more interesting question to answer.
DL: What is the role of technology when you design?
AD : I hold the position Ritchie articulated with characteristic precision in Basel: what we call AI is not intelligence — it is Artificial Pattern Recognition and Prediction. It focuses on logic, not on senses, emotion, or the capacity to sidestep convention. Clients increasingly present me with AI-generated interior renderings — technically accomplished, impeccably lit, perfectly proportioned. They optimize for the image, not for the experience of waking in the room at 6 a.m. when summer light hits a pillow at the wrong angle. The distinction I draw is between physics and phenomenology: machines can handle the former with increasing sophistication, and I use computational tools for spatial optimization and technical coordination. But the latter — how a space will feel to a specific human body at a specific time of day in a specific season — requires lived experience, embodied judgment, and the kind of tacit knowledge that accumulates only through years of inhabiting and designing spaces. That remains irreducibly human work. The algorithm does not wake up to harsh light. We do. And because we do, we are the appropriate instrument for solving problems that involve human experience.
DL: What is the role of the color, materials and ambient in design?
AD : They are the primary sensory medium of interior design — not its decoration but its substance. In my practice, materials are understood as communicative agents operating at very low volume but very high reliability: the matte directionality of engineered timber veneer, the fine-grained haze of certain limestones, the controlled luster of hand-finished leather all speak to the body rather than the eye, producing emotional states rather than visual impressions. Ian Ritchie, in Basel, made the same observation about glass from the structural direction: glass has memory — when you heat and cool it, you program behavior into the molecular structure. I say the same of wood: a plank cut in winter has tighter grain than summer lumber; it expands differently, ages differently. Most designers do not know this because they approach materials as surfaces rather than as organisms. Ambient — particularly light — is the instrument that makes all of this legible. I treat lighting not as a service system but as a spatial medium: the single element most capable of transforming the emotional register of a room without altering any other element. Color I consider last, and sparingly — the conversation between material and light usually renders explicit color decisions unnecessary.
DL: Which people you interacted had the most influence on your design?
AD : Ian Ritchie has been a significant intellectual influence — not because our scales of practice are similar, but because our underlying preoccupations are identical. We met at the BLT Design Awards in Basel, and the conversation that followed — about negative space, material memory, the phenomenology of pause, and the limits of computational design — crystallized things I had been thinking for years without adequate language. His observation that the external walls of buildings are the interior walls of the city's living rooms positions interior design not as the decoration of private space but as the intimate counterpoint to public architecture — a framing I find both accurate and galvanizing. The feng shui masters I have worked with across my career have been equally formative, in a different register: they provided a philosophical framework for understanding spatial energy that deepened my understanding of why certain design decisions produce certain experiential effects across cultures and contexts. That framework has proven more consistently useful than any design theory I encountered in formal education.
DL: Which books you read had the most effect on your design?
AD : The books that most shaped my thinking are not, for the most part, design books. Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows remains the single most important text I have encountered for understanding how light and material darkness function as design instruments — his argument that beauty is inseparable from the patina of time and the quality of shadow is one I return to every time I specify a surface finish or consider the reflectivity of a material in a particular room. The philosophical tradition of phenomenology — particularly Merleau-Ponty's work on embodied perception — provided the conceptual foundation for understanding why design affects people the way it does: not through visual impression but through the body's pre-cognitive encounter with space, volume, and surface. And the writings of classical Chinese aesthetic philosophy, particularly on the concept of emptiness as positive presence, offered a framework that I recognize as the Eastern complement to what I was absorbing from the Western tradition. The synthesis of these two lineages is what I mean when I describe my approach as the integration of Eastern philosophical depth with Western spatial precision.
DL: What is your favorite color, place, food, season, thing and brand?
AD : Color: the particular gray-white of natural limestone in afternoon shadow — it changes character every twenty minutes and cannot be replicated by any synthetic material. Place: Basel in winter, specifically the Elisabethenkirche, where I had one of the most productive conversations of my career; and Hong Kong at dawn, before the city has resumed its velocity. Food: anything eaten slowly, in a well-designed room, with people worth talking to — the quality of the environment is inseparable from the quality of the meal. Season: late autumn, when the light becomes low and angled and every surface acquires a quality of revealed texture that summer conceals. Thing: my sketchbook — the archive of sustained attention that precedes all design thinking. Brand: the Italian workshops I have worked with for years — not household names, but possessed of a material knowledge and craft discipline that no marketing budget can manufacture or replace.
DL: Please tell us a little memoir, a funny thing you had experienced as a designer?
AD : Early in my career in Hong Kong, I spent three weeks in a state of quiet obsession over the precise specification of a limestone floor for a residential project — the quarry, the finish, the direction of laying, the joint width. Three weeks on a floor. The client called me the morning after installation, not to comment on the limestone, but to tell me that for the first time in years she had woken up and remained in bed for an extra twenty minutes, simply because the room felt different. She could not articulate why. I, of course, knew exactly why — but I had the good sense not to explain it. The lesson I took from that phone call has stayed with me through every subsequent project: the best design is the design that produces its effect without announcing its mechanism. When the client feels the result and cannot identify the cause, the designer has done their job completely. That floor was never once mentioned in any subsequent conversation about the project. And that silence was, in its way, the highest compliment I have ever received.
DL: When you were a little child, was it obvious that you would become a great designer?
AD : Looking back with the selective clarity that hindsight allows: yes, though I would not have had the word 'designer' for it. What was apparent was that I noticed things other children seemed not to — the way a room changed character at dusk, the texture of a particular wall, the peculiar silence of a space with high ceilings. I remember being transfixed, as a very young child, by a jewelry store in Hong Kong — not by the jewelry, but by the way the light had been arranged to make the ordinary appear extraordinary. That store became, years later, the conceptual model for my first commercial commission. The child's attention was already doing the work; the profession simply gave it a name and a discipline.
DL: What do you think about future; what do you see will happen in thousand years from now?
AD : A thousand years from now, the spaces that will have endured — those that people will still be sitting in, still being moved by — will share one quality: they will have been designed with an understanding of the human nervous system that transcended the stylistic preoccupations of their moment. The Elisabethenkirche in Basel, where I met Ian Ritchie, is eight hundred years old and was built without computers, without algorithms, without any of the technical infrastructure we consider essential to contemporary practice. It endures because it was designed around something that does not change: the way light, volume, and material affect a human body in space. I think design a millennium from now will still be solving that problem — and the practitioners who solve it best will be those who understood that technology is a means, never a destination, and that the body is the measure of all things spatial. What persists is not the style, not the technique, not the cultural moment — it is the quality of the encounter between a human being and a space that was designed with full attention to what that encounter requires.
DL: Please tell us anything you wish your fans to know about you, your design and anything else?
AD : I want people to know that I am, first and most consistently, a listener. Before I have designed anything for a client, I have spent considerable time understanding how they actually live — not how they wish to live, or how they imagine they should live, but how they live: what time they wake, which direction they face when they sit still, what they reach for first in the morning. Design that does not begin there is projection rather than service, and it shows. I also want it understood that the integration of feng shui principles in my work is not a stylistic choice or a cultural affectation — it is a genuine philosophical framework for understanding spatial energy that I have found consistently productive across twenty-five years of practice and across every cultural context in which I have worked. It is, at its core, a discipline of attention: a structured way of asking what a space needs in order to support the life it will contain. And finally: I am a musician. The structural principles governing rhythm, tension, and resolution in music are, I believe, the same principles that govern space. The best rooms, like the best compositions, have a quality that deepens with familiarity and reveals new dimensions on each encounter. You notice different things the tenth time you sit in a great room than you did the first. That capacity for continued revelation — that depth beneath the surface — is the standard I hold my work to, and the reason I will never stop designing.
