Inside the Hong Kong flat where everything is carefully curated – even the cat

Some people discover their dream home by chance. For Jeff Chan and Liz Leung, it took two patient years. Living in a rented flat in Jardine’s Lookout, they were determined to stay in the neighbourhood and had even pinpointed the building they longed to call home. Yet, week after week of scouring estate agency windows yielded nothing, and they nearly gave up hope. At the end of last year, however, their persistence paid off: a 1,200 sq ft apartment in their coveted block came onto the market.

“We knew what we liked and didn’t want to compromise,” says Chan. The appeal was clear: “We love older buildings as they tend to be more space efficient with high ceilings and a lot of windows.”

Their new home, now almost 50 years old, offered an added luxury – every room faces the harbour, bathing the interior in natural light. That includes three bedrooms and two bathrooms.

As legal professionals with a shared passion for timeless design, the young Hong Kong couple envisaged a minimal home that echoed the comfortable chic of a Parisian apartment but without any starkness. To realise this vision, they enlisted interior designer Amy Butler of House of Butler, whose Ibizan sensibility and abhorrence of clutter made her the ideal collaborator.

Butler began by gutting the flat. Her first major inter­vention was to open up the enclosed kitchen and borrow space from an awkwardly placed guest bathroom that stuck out a few feet from the front entrance. This move carved out room for a spacious dining area, separated from the new kitchen by a sleek black-framed sliding glass door.

“At first, we were worried whether the loss of bathroom space would make it feel too small,” says Leung. “Now that we live with it, we don’t notice it. We are so glad Amy guided us towards that decision because we love entertaining and otherwise wouldn’t have had a dining room to accommodate our long table.”