Inside a Hong Kong interior designer’s bold flat, which serves as a canvas for new ideas
Melbourne-born Aviva Duncan experiments with different inspirations in the Mid-Levels’ home she shares with her two daughters
Blame it on an occupational hazard, but Australian interior designer Aviva Duncan has repainted her 2,700 sq ft Mid-Levels flat six times in as many years.
“I can’t help it,” she says. “In my line of work I see so many wonderful things, and my own home is the perfect canvas to road test them.”
Duncan, who was born in Melbourne, lived in Hong Kong from 2001 to 2004 before moving to Tokyo, where she designed the interior of a house that was rebuilt for her young family. She returned to Hong Kong in 2011 with her daughters, Mia and Lucy, now 13 and eight, respectively.
Duncan had redecorated several properties for her family, yet it was only on her return to Hong Kong that she decided to study for a fine arts degree at the city’s Savannah College of Art and Design.
“I didn’t just want to decorate, and the course makes you look at design in a completely different way,” she says. “It teaches you about historical context instead of just aesthetics, so design becomes a richer experience.”
It also reinforced her understanding of the value of a human-centric approach to design: “Design is a problem-solving tool. Things can still be beautiful but they must make sense.”
It is an approach that has stood her in good stead. When she first saw the Po Shan Road flat, it had been empty for several months and had an air of neglect.
