How a Hong Kong interior designer transformed a dated rental flat into a family home

Most people would run for the hills when confronted with a dated, poorly decorated rental flat. Not so interior designer Aviva Duncan. When she was taken to view her 2,100 sq ft, three-bedroom, two-bathroom home in Mid-Levels, she spotted its potential instantly and signed the lease almost immediately.

“My previous apartment was one big room, like a box – I wanted more of an interior journey,” says Duncan, who is from Melbourne, Australia, but moved to Hong Kong in 2000, then Tokyo from 2004 to 2011, before returning to the city.

“I liked the different layers of this flat, where one room leads to another and then onto another, and I love the luxury of having both a separate dining room and breakfast nook.”

What she wasn’t so keen on was the dated look – frosted windows and ugly floor tiles in the kitchen (see Tried + tested) – and an electrical system that couldn’t support multiple appliances simultaneously. With the blessing of her landlord, who also gave her a rent reduc­tion, she took it upon herself to fix it up.

“Twenty years ago, people wouldn’t have dreamed of investing a cent in a rental property but these days they are increasingly making rental spaces their own. Most of my core business involves cosmetic renovations and beefing up the electrics,” Duncan says. “I felt it was worth spending money to make this flat some­where I wanted to live.

“Hong Kong is transient but I didn’t want that sense of transience for my family, such as putting up with certain things like unsightly wallpaper and make-do furniture purely because we might be moving on in a few years.”