Why Spencer Fung is in the Design 100

Spencer Fung trained first in Hong Kong before completing his architectural education at Cambridge and the Architectural Association in London, founding Spencer Fung Architects in 1990. The practice is best known for a long-running collaboration with Carole Bamford’s Daylesford Organic, shaping the farm shops, restaurants and spas that have defined the brand’s rural-luxury aesthetic since the early 2000s, alongside private houses and retail interiors for clients including The Berkeley and the Royal Opera House.

Since joining Ralph Pucci in 2018, Fung has carried that same instinct into furniture: his Wishbone collection translates the branch-like forms of trees into hand-worked benches, loungers and chairs, each piece keeping the trace of the material it came from rather than disguising it. He works as readily in Chinese ink and Jurassic clay as in timber, and his book Architecture by Hand sets out the belief running through all of it — that architecture, furniture and landscape are best treated as one continuous discipline rather than three separate ones.