I'm back (again)

Cambodia was wonderful! For anyone that has not yet been - you must! We spent 1 day in Phnom Penh (not enough) which we spent running between the Royal Palace, Silver Pagoda, the Russian Market, and then on to S21- or Tuol Sleng where about 15,000 prisoners were tortured during the Khmer Rouge regime - and then on to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek - where survivors of S21 were killed and buried in mass graves. Sounds like a nice holiday, hey? It was just as depressing as it sounds, I had to fight back tears, but well worth visiting if you have an interest in history. From there we had 4 days in Siem Reap. We spent 2 full days checking out the temples including Angkor Wat - the biggest, but not necessarily the best. There are literally hundreds of these temples in the area, ranging from 700 to 1,000 years old, you could spend weeks discovering them all. Two days was plenty enough for me! The rest of our time was spent by the fabulous pool at Raffles Hotel (if you've never stayed there, then that's definitely another must!), as well as the floating villages just outside of the town. There are so many great restaurants in Cambodia, I highly recommend Meric at the Hotel de la Paix - in Siem Reap where I discovered the amazing Taittinger champagne - delish! Here are a few pics (in no particular order) and I mean just a few. I stopped counting the photos I took after several hundred...

The weather was fantastic, the people are lovely and so friendly, food is good, everything is cheap (well, everything except Raffles...) so best you get yourself over there before the hordes of tourists get much worse!

Kung Hei Fat Choi!

Or Happy Chinese New Year! This year it's the year of the Ox for anyone interested...
I am heading off to Cambodia for the week, I hope to post some wonderful photos and tips when I return. Bye for now!

Today I'm dreaming about...

this resin spiral chair by Louis Durot. It goes under the hammer at Pierre Bergé & Associés on January 29th if anyone feels like bidding on my behalf...

Progress...

Here are a few of the photos I took at the studio apartment over the weekend. Work has come to a standstill because of the impending Chinese New Year holidays...so these might be the last photos for a few weeks. But I'm excited...they've made real progress!

Looking in from the front door - to the left is where the new walk-in-robe will be...and a glimpse of the new opened up space and new window.

Its very much a construction site... but I'm excited by how much bigger it looks already without the internal walls, and one large window instead of two. Unfortunately the temporary balustrade they built outside the window is still there so its hard to get an idea of the full view...

From this angle you can see the new, slightly larger bathroom on the right...and the space where the kitchenette will be on the left (where all those power sockets are in the wall)

Looking into the new bathroom...

Looking out into the living space from the bathroom...


And the roof....the old ugly light fittings are gone, the floor has had a new layer of concrete, the concealed light fittings are almost there...and we now have the structure of the cabinetry that will house a sink, mini-bar fridge, washer/dryer and the hot water system. Its going to be a nice place for a BBQ when the weather gets better here!

Inspirations

It's been a busier week at work than I anticipated, hence the lack of posts... But before I sign off and wish you all a great weekend, I'll leave you with some of the images that we are using as inspiration for the renovation of the studio apartment. I'll post update photos next week!

Stern McCafferty

Thomas O'Brien

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Rees Roberts

Page Goolrick

?? Morris Moreno photography

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Fawn Galli

Elle Decoration (UK)

Deborah Berke

Shelton Mindel

Selldorf Architects

Studio Apartment - the before photos

I’m so excited to be able to share with you this solo project that I started working on a few months ago.

The apartment is tiny, only 420 sq ft (about 40 sq mtrs), but one of it’s redeeming features is that it has a private rooftop the same size. It’s located in a quiet (well, quiet for Hong Kong) cul-de-sac in an up and coming area.

My client, an expat bachelor, approached me via my blog just after he purchased the property late last year. With the apartment being so small, and he not owning really any furniture to speak of, we’ve completely gutted the place and are starting again from scratch. How fun!

These are the photos we took before construction started just before Xmas....

Looking in through the front door...horrible tiled floors (a pet peeve of mine). From here you can see into the second bedroom. Yes, that's right. The previous owners managed to squeeze 2 bedrooms into a 420 sq ft apartment...

One of the tiny bedrooms...although even from these you can see the green outlook from the windows - a real rarity in Hong Kong, and something we intend to maximise as much as we can.

The second tiny bedroom..

The cramped living space, and the nook that was the kitchen. Yes, past tense. They took out the kitchen and put it on the roof!

I'm not sure what to say about this bathroom...I'm pretty sure the pictures speak for themselves...

And last but not least, the roof. You can see the high rises the building is surrounded by on one side, and the green mountainside on the other. We intend on having cooking facilities on the roof still, but there will definitely be a kitchen inside!

The contractor has already started construction, its been gutted and the new internal walls have now been built. After checking out their progress on Sunday the most exciting thing for me was seeing the new windows. I forgot to take update photos - but I'll be back again this weekend to check on their progress so I'll post some new shots of it then, so stay tuned!

Happy New Year - I'm back!

Already! It seems that staying away from blogging was harder than I thought...

Before I get back to regular posting again I have to thank those of you that sent me emails and comments - you have no idea how much that meant to me. So many sweet messages from people I've never even met before...it still astounds me.

Let's not dwell on last year - it was more disappointing than bad as such, but I think I worked pretty hard all year so I'm hoping to see the fruits of my labour this year...I hope we all do. 2009 will be a good year - simply because I've decided that it will be. I already have some good news to share, so stay tuned for Monday when I'll post what I hope will be the first of many exciting projects.

Until then, I leave you with this piece by Rob Wynne. I've seen a few of his pieces in magazines and could not track down the artist until recently, and so I wanted to share it with you guys. You really are the greatest!