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Interview with Another Design |
Home > Designer Interviews > Another Design |
Editor Frank Scott (FS) from DesignPRWire has interviewed designer Another Design (AD) for A’ Design Award and Competition. You can access the full profile of Another Design by clicking here.
FS: Could you please tell us more about your art and design background? What made you become an artist/designer? Have you always wanted to be a designer?
AD: My formation as a luxury interior designer emerged from two converging influences: the spatial density of Hong Kong, which cultivated an early intuition for how built environments shape human behavior, and a formal education at the University for the Creative Arts in the United Kingdom. Design, for me, was never a career choice so much as a perceptual disposition — a specific way of reading space, material, and human experience simultaneously. Early commercial work in Hong Kong's retail and hospitality sectors provided the rigorous professional discipline that underpins the practice today.
FS: Can you tell us more about your company / design studio?
AD: Another Design International, established in 2001, is a bespoke interior architecture studio with project presence across London, Hong Kong, Italy, Poland, and mainland China. As Chief Creative Officer, I lead a multidisciplinary team specializing in luxury residential and hospitality design — work distinguished by its integration of Eastern philosophical frameworks with Western spatial and material traditions. The studio has been recognized by LUXlife Magazine's Leading Designers program and honored with the Italian A' Design Award for excellence in interior design.
FS: What is "design" for you?
AD: Design is the disciplined translation of human experience — behavioral, emotional, and cultural — into spatial order. In my 2026 essay published in Hong Kong Economic Journal Monthly, I proposed that the defining challenge for contemporary interior design is not stylistic innovation but what I termed 'spatial deceleration': the capacity of a well-designed environment to slow the cognitive and emotional tempo of its occupants. This is also an ethical proposition — every material choice and spatial decision carries consequences for user wellbeing, asset longevity, and environmental responsibility.
FS: What kinds of works do you like designing most?
AD: Luxury residential design engages me most deeply, precisely because the evaluation criteria are the most demanding: the space must serve a specific human life at every hour, in every mood, across years. These projects require the full integration of conceptual clarity, spatial intelligence, material precision, and interpersonal sensitivity — there is no room for generic solutions. Projects that additionally require a complete rethinking of spatial logic, rather than merely a refinement of surfaces, are the ones I find most generative.
FS: What is your most favorite design, could you please tell more about it?
AD: The luxury penthouse at Battersea Power Station, London, remains the project I return to most often intellectually. The brief — 'create a lifestyle' — required a complete reconfiguration of the interior architecture: relocating walls, redesigning spatial sequences, and developing custom leather, timber, and aluminum detailing in collaboration with Italian artisans, all while integrating feng shui principles to govern the energetic flow of the space. The project was shortlisted for the Building Awards Architectural Design of the Year and demonstrated a conviction central to my practice: the most important design work is often the least visible structural rethinking that precedes any material selection.
FS: What is your favorite material / platform / technology?
AD: My material choices are governed by what I call material integrity — the condition in which a substance is deployed in honest alignment with its physical properties and expected lifespan. Steel, timber, stone, glass, and leather are the consistent foundations of my palette, valued for their inherent character and capacity to age with dignity. In my 2026 design thesis, I identified tactility as a primary vector of perceived value in high-end interior design: the matte directionality of engineered timber veneer, the fine-grained haze of limestone, the controlled luster of hand-finished leather are not decorative effects but communicative acts that produce durable emotional memory.
FS: When do you feel the most creative?
AD: Creativity, in my experience, is an emergent condition of a well-cultivated perceptual life rather than a schedulable state. Music is my most consistent creative catalyst: I am drawn to the structural logic by which musical composition produces specific emotional states — the interplay of tension and resolution, density and silence — and I translate these principles into spatial thinking with considerable regularity. The concept of rhythm as a spatial organizing principle, which I developed in my 2026 HKEJ essay, emerged directly from this cross-disciplinary engagement.
FS: Which aspects of a design do you focus more during designing?
AD: My primary focus is the experiential logic of the space — the sequence of perceptual and emotional events a person moves through as they inhabit it. In my 2026 design framework, I organized this thinking around four spatial languages: linearity, rhythm, tactility, and temperament. These function as analytical criteria against which every design decision is evaluated: does this choice deepen or diminish the spatial rhythm? Does this material reinforce or disrupt the atmospheric temperament? This framework emerged from sustained observation of how spaces actually perform over time — how they age and how initial decisions either compound in value or depreciate.
FS: What makes a design successful?
AD: Design success operates across three temporal registers simultaneously. In the immediate register, a successful design must create its intended experiential effect from first encounter. In the medium-term register, it must perform reliably across the full range of use conditions — different times of day, different seasons, different moods. In the long-term register — which I consider most consequential — it must age with dignity, revealing new qualities as its materials develop patina and as its occupants grow into it. This is what I mean by 'durational value': the capacity of a design to remain meaningful, not merely functional, across the full lifespan of an asset.
FS: When judging a design as good or bad, which aspects do you consider first?
AD: My first analytical question is experiential: does this space produce its intended effect on the people who inhabit it? From there I assess conceptual coherence — whether a disciplined organizing principle governs all design decisions or whether the space is an accumulation of effects without structural logic. I then evaluate material intelligence: not whether materials are expensive, but whether they are used with restraint and purpose. Finally, I consider contextual responsiveness: good design is always in dialogue with its time, place, and culture.
FS: From your point of view, what are the responsibilities of a designer for society and environment?
AD: Environmental and social responsibility are structural obligations, not supplementary considerations. The most important professional insight of the past decade is that sustainable design and luxury design are not antithetical but convergent: the highest-quality materials — natural stone, solid timber, precision-engineered metals — are also, when properly specified, the most ecologically responsible, because they are designed to last for generations rather than fashion cycles. In urban contexts like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing, the designer also carries a social responsibility to create restorative counterspaces to high-density, high-tempo city life.
FS: How do you think the "design field" is evolving? What is the future of design?
AD: The field is navigating a productive tension between technological acceleration — digital fabrication, parametric modeling, AI — and a counter-movement toward craft authenticity and material presence. The future lies not in choosing between these forces but in their intelligent integration: technology in service of craft, innovation in service of meaning. The most durable design proposition, in any economic environment, is organized around timeless principles — clarity of line, coherence of spatial rhythm, depth of tactile experience — rather than stylistic currency.
FS: When was your last exhibition and where was it? And when do you want to hold your next exhibition?
AD: My most recent exhibition was at the 2025 Venice Biennale, as part of the Time Space Existence exhibition — a platform examining the relationship between designed space and human temporal experience. The thematic framing resonated directly with my own developing design philosophy: the understanding that good design is fundamentally about time — about slowing it, deepening it, and making it more fully inhabitable.
FS: Where does the design inspiration for your works come from? How do you feed your creativity? What are your sources of inspirations?
AD: My most productive creative sources are drawn from adjacent disciplines rather than from design itself. Music provides structural principles — the management of rhythm, tension, resolution, and silence — that translate directly into spatial thinking. Chinese contemporary art offers a diagnostic lens on the relationship between design and the societies it inhabits. Travel, particularly to cities with distinctive design cultures, continuously recalibrates my spatial reference framework. Above all, I feed creativity through the discipline of sustained, non-instrumental attention to the sensory qualities of everyday environments.
FS: How would you describe your design style? What made you explore more this style and what are the main characteristics of your style? What's your approach to design?
AD: I resist 'style' as a primary descriptor, because a consistent aesthetic vocabulary applied across different contexts is the signature of a designer who has stopped asking questions. What characterizes my work is a set of principles: spatial deceleration — designing environments calibrated to slow emotional tempo; the integration of Eastern philosophical frameworks, particularly feng shui, with Western spatial traditions; and material honesty — specifying every material in a way that reflects its actual properties and lifespan. These principles produce different visual outcomes in different contexts, which is precisely the point.
FS: Where do you live? Do you feel the cultural heritage of your country affects your designs? What are the pros and cons during designing as a result of living in your country?
AD: I divide my practice between London and Hong Kong — two cities whose design cultures and urban tempos are profoundly different, and whose tension is a primary source of creative energy. Hong Kong cultivated my sensitivity to spatial compression and the psychological necessity of restorative interior environments. London provides proximity to exceptional craftsmanship, international design discourse, and the cultural density that continuously refines creative thinking. The synthesis of these two worlds — the Eastern philosophical and the Western spatial — is, I believe, what gives the work its distinctive register.
FS: Can you talk a little about your design process?
AD: My process is organized around four sequential phases. First, immersion: sustained research and observation of site, client, program, and cultural context. Second, conceptual development: identifying the single disciplined organizing principle that will govern all subsequent decisions — a concept that is genuinely responsive to this specific context, not a mood board. Third, spatial development: translating concept into a detailed sequence of spatial experiences, in close collaboration with engineers and lighting designers. Fourth, material and detail development: specifying every material and finish with the same conceptual rigor applied to the spatial design.
FS: Could you please share some pearls of wisdom for young designers? What are your suggestions to young, up and coming designers?
AD: Design is not, fundamentally, a visual discipline — it is a cognitive and empathetic one. Develop your capacity for deep listening before your capacity for visual expression. Live as a designer, not just work as one: design thinking is a perceptual disposition that must be cultivated continuously through engagement with art, music, philosophy, and the close observation of everyday environments. Above all, resist the seduction of personal style — the designer who has found their style has stopped asking questions. Stay curious longer than feels comfortable.
FS: What is your "golden rule" in design?
AD: Never design the same space twice. This is not a proscription against material preferences or formal consistency — it is a commitment to the principle that every design problem is genuinely different and deserves a genuinely original response. In the framework of my 2026 design thesis, this translates into a commitment to 'temperament' — the coherent atmospheric quality that emerges from the disciplined integration of linearity, rhythm, and tactility in response to the specific character of each project. Temperament cannot be templated; it must be discovered.
FS: What skills are most important for a designer?
AD: Genuine listening is the most important and most undervalued skill in the profession. Before any design response can be developed, the problem must be understood with precision — who is this space for, how will it be used, what cultural context must it honor? From listening, conceptual rigor: the ability to identify and consistently apply the organizing principle of a design across every scale of decision-making. Then spatial intelligence, communication, and finally resilience — the capacity to sustain commitment to a design vision through the inevitable periods of resistance that separate excellent work from merely competent work.
FS: What was your most important job experience?
AD: The early years of commercial practice in Hong Kong — high-expectation, demanding-timeline retail and hospitality projects for major institutional clients — provided the professional discipline that underpins everything since. The Madia Jewelry Group commission was the single most formative project: it forced an original engagement with questions of light, materiality, and spatial sequence that I had not previously encountered in concentrated form. More recently, the Battersea Power Station penthouse represented the international demonstration of the full scope of what the practice could achieve.
FS: Who are some of your clients?
AD: My commercial portfolio includes Hutchison Whampoa, Maxims, Jaguar, Kowloon Development, McDonald's, Wai Yuen Tong, and LuLu Cheung, spanning retail, automotive, food service, real estate development, and luxury fashion. In the luxury residential sector, I have worked with private clients in Hong Kong, London, and internationally, with notable projects at Battersea Power Station and One Hyde Park, London. What these clients share is an understanding that design is a long-term investment in the quality of environment, asset value, and human experience.
FS: What are your future plans? What is next for you?
AD: My immediate focus is the development of several luxury residential and hospitality projects in which I am applying the design philosophy articulated in my 2026 HKEJ essay with increasing precision — designing environments explicitly calibrated for spatial deceleration and long-term durational value. I am also expanding my engagement with international design discourse through jury service (currently serving BLT Built Design Awards, MUSE Awards, and IAA), published writing, and the public intellectual role that practitioners at this career stage have a responsibility to fulfill.
FS: Do you have any works-in-progress being designed that you would like to talk about?
AD: I am currently engaged with a series of private villa commissions in London and internationally, applying the four spatial languages — linearity, rhythm, tactility, and temperament — with considerable precision. A designer hotel project is also in early development: a program type I find particularly demanding because it requires residential-quality spatial experience within commercial operational constraints. Both projects extend the sustained inquiry into durational value and spatial deceleration that defines the current direction of my practice.
FS: How can people contact you?
AD: Another Design International can be reached through our website at www.another-design.com or by email at london@another-design.com. Our London studio is also available by telephone at +44 208 549 2311. I maintain a professional presence on LinkedIn and welcome connection from practitioners, institutions, and prospective clients who share a commitment to design excellence and cultural depth.
FS: Thank you for providing us with this opportunity to interview you.
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