The Chinese Library at Tai Kwun: AB Concept’s three rooms, and the one standing on its own history

Interiors · Hong Kong

Reading time: 9 min

Three rooms run in a line along one floor of Hong Kong’s former Police Headquarters. AB Concept gave the east wing to China, the west wing to Britain, and made the room between them out of the building’s own uniform, badges and armoury. That middle room is the hinge, and it is the only one of the three standing exactly where its history happened.

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Tai Kwun occupies about six acres in the middle of Hong Kong Island: sixteen heritage buildings on the site of the former Central Police Station, the Central Magistracy and Victoria Prison, all three of which were made Declared Monuments, the territory’s highest statutory protection, in 1995.

Its revitalisation is one of the significant conservation projects of the last twenty years. Herzog & de Meuron were architects and masterplanners, Purcell were conservation architects from 2008, and Rocco Design Architects were executive architects, delivered for the Hong Kong Jockey Club at a cost of HK$3.8 billion across a design and construction period running from 2006 to 2018. The compound opened to the public on 29 May 2018. It took the Award of Excellence at the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation in 2019 and a RIBA International Award for Excellence in 2021, and it drew 3.6 million visitors in its first year.

In the autumn of that first year, Aqua Restaurant Group opened three venues across the whole first floor of one building in the compound, with interiors by AB Concept, the Hong Kong practice founded in 1999 by Ed Ng and Terence Ngan. The building is the Police Headquarters Block of 1919, and the floor they took was the Police Officers’ Mess.

The Chinese Library went into the east wing. Statement, a British restaurant, went into the west. The Dispensary, a bar, went into the middle. Ng’s own account of the method is characteristically direct: “For us, it’s all about stories. This is the Central Police Station, and all these motifs take inspiration from the architecture.”

The middle room is the one that matters

Read as three separate restaurants, this is a good scheme. Read as a sequence, it is a much better one, and the reason is the room in the centre.

The Chinese Library and Statement are both, in a sense, imported: a Chinese dining room and a British one, placed either side of a corridor in a colonial building. The Dispensary is neither. It sits in the former mess hall, and, more precisely, Tai Kwun’s own account records that in the early 1900s the police force built themselves a bar on the first floor exactly where The Dispensary now stands. Of the three rooms, only the middle one is doing what its space was already doing.

That gives the plan a logic you can walk. You arrive up the original iron-balustraded staircase, past double-height circular windows, into a reception on the first floor. Turn one way for China. Turn the other for Britain. And between them, holding the two apart and together, is the room that belonged to the institution that governed both.

AB Concept clearly understood this, because The Dispensary is the only one of the three built out of the building’s own material rather than a cultural reference.

A room made of institutional insignia

The Dispensary’s surfaces are, almost without exception, converted police apparatus.

The walls are painted in the dark blue of the Hong Kong police uniform, described in the studio’s own award submission as winter blue, with velvet furnishings in the same uniform colours. The tabletops are copper trays, a reference to the official plaque. The bar is modelled on a police armoury, with ornate shelving, gold lighting and a metallic fence running around it. The floor is black and white checked mosaic, recalling what was there before. And on the walls are two mirrored shields inscribed with historical narratives about the building, alongside backlit silver police badges with etched writing, which continue out to the first-floor reception.

None of that is heraldic decoration in the usual sense. A shield, a badge, a plaque and a uniform colour are the actual instruments by which an institution identifies itself, and AB Concept turned them into wall finishes, table tops and light fittings. The room is furnished with the building’s paperwork.

It is also, quietly, the room that has proved most durable. Eight years on, The Dispensary is still trading, still described by its verandahs overlooking the Parade Ground and Hollywood Road, and still doing the job of the connector between the two dining rooms.

The Chinese Library: jade, onyx and lantern light

The east wing is the piece your eye goes to, and it works on a straightforward premise: the menu draws on the regional Chinese cooking that arrived in Hong Kong with successive waves of migration, so the room does the same with its references.

The walls are jade coloured, a deliberate nod to the place jade held in the colonial-era trade, hung with ornate gold mirrors and worked in a palette of bronze, copper and celadon. Backlit green onyx screens divide the space and give it its glow. Tabletops are black and white antique Chinese marble. Seating is semi-circular velvet booths with antique-inspired consoles, brass detail and lamp-lit mirrors, over a chestnut-brown floor.

Overhead, chandeliers drawn from Chinese lanterns hang from the exposed roof structure, described elsewhere as clusters of oriental lamps. That detail is doing more than it looks: hanging soft, clustered light from an exposed colonial roof structure is precisely the East-meets-West collision the whole scheme is about, achieved without a single applied motif.

The colonial fabric is left in place throughout. Original wooden flooring, original colonial doors opening onto the verandah, and the balcony louvres, the shutters that appear across British colonial buildings in this climate because they were the ventilation strategy before there was any other. There are also antique mirrors hung above the windows in the manner of traditional Chinese plaques, which is a small, precise piece of double-coding.

Statement, and what happened to it

The west wing took the opposite national brief: a British restaurant, drawing on London’s more adventurous kitchens.

AB Concept worked it in shimmering blue and green fabrics and turquoise upholstery, with leather banquettes, onyx tables and angular private booths. There were bespoke pearl-glass chandeliers modelled on British lanterns, badge-shaped mirrors referencing the building’s history, turquoise cracked plaster walls, and, retained, the century-old timber floor, the colonial pitched ceilings and the full-length period windows.

Statement traded from autumn 2018 until some point before May 2022, when Aqua opened Cantina, a southern Italian restaurant, in the same room. The name is well chosen: it comes directly from the room’s history as the Police Officers’ Mess. The building fabric AB Concept preserved is all still there, the pitched ceilings, the period windows and the timber floor, and the teal palette survived the change of concept, so Cantina reads as a re-dress of the room rather than a replacement of it.

Which means that of AB Concept’s original trilogy, two rooms remain substantially as designed eight years later, and those two are the ones that were entered for awards. The Chinese Library and The Dispensary were both shortlisted at the Restaurant & Bar Design Awards in 2019, The Chinese Library in three categories including Heritage Building, and both took an Honourable Mention in the Historical Restoration category at the ARCASIA Awards for Architecture in 2022.

The staircase, and the conservation detail worth knowing

The best single detail in this building is not in any of the three restaurants. It is the stair you climb to reach them.

The Police Headquarters Block’s iron-balustraded staircase is one of its most significant features, and it presented the conservation team with the standard problem of historic balustrades: the gaps between balusters are wider than any modern safety code allows, and the usual remedies either replace the balustrade or clutter it with an added screen.

Tai Kwun’s own account of the work records the solution. Every fourth baluster was thickened. The rhythm of the original reads unchanged from a few paces away, the gaps come within code, and nothing was removed. It is the kind of decision that never appears in the photographs and entirely determines whether a building like this can carry on being used.

That is worth setting alongside the restaurant work, because it is the same argument at a different scale. Purcell’s scope at Tai Kwun explicitly included supporting tenants on their fit-outs, so AB Concept’s three rooms were designed inside a live conservation regime rather than into an empty shell. What survives of the 1919 building inside them, the floors, the doors, the louvres, the ceilings, the windows, survives because somebody was making sure it did.

AB Concept, and what they do with a brief like this

Ng and Ngan founded AB Concept in Hong Kong in 1999, and now work from Hong Kong, Taipei and Milan across sixteen countries. Ng is the interior designer, Ngan the architect. Their own description of what they do is unusually plain: “We believe we play the roles of storytellers of space.”

Their record is heavily weighted towards hotel and restaurant work for Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental, Rosewood, W and Waldorf Astoria, with Mei Ume at the Four Seasons at Ten Trinity Square in London, Bar Trigona and Yun House in Kuala Lumpur, ARGO at the Four Seasons Hong Kong, Peacock Alley at the Waldorf Astoria, K11 Musea, and Paper Moon at Raffles London at The OWO among the better known. They design furniture with Poltrona Frau, lighting with Lasvit and carpet with Tai Ping.

On this project the two founders were explicit about the intention, and the quote is the clearest statement of the scheme’s ambition: “By preserving and integrating some of the earliest architecture of the British colonial era into the new restaurant designs, we aimed to faithfully reflect the story of Hong Kong’s eclectic mix of Eastern and Western cultural influences. The unifying trait is, of course, the inherent colonial charm of the original structure, and it was an honour to delve into the past life of the building as Hong Kong’s Central Police Station.”

Ng has also said something elsewhere that this project illustrates neatly: “Luxury is no longer about marble or glitzy design. It’s all about the experience now: it’s about experiences you can’t reproduce.” Three rooms whose entire content is drawn from one specific building, in one specific city, is about as unreproducible as restaurant design gets.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

What lifts this scheme is that AB Concept answered the same building three different ways in three adjacent rooms, and made the sequence do the work.

In the east wing they made a Chinese room and let it meet the colonial roof structure head on. In the west they made a British one. And in the middle, in the only space of the three that was already doing this job, they built a room out of a uniform colour, a badge, a plaque and an armoury, which is to say out of the institution itself rather than a picture of it.

Two of the three are still there, doing daily service inside a declared monument eight years on. In a city that rebuilds as fast as Hong Kong does, that is the only test of a heritage interior that counts.