DESIGN PROFILE - joyce wang

If she hadn’t become an interior designer, Joyce Wang thinks she would probably have gone into film. ‘I’ve always been jealous of how a good film can inspire people to talk about it afterwards – take Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which has so much layering and hidden clues,’ she says. ‘My hope with our interiors is that people will want to re-experience them, to get a bit more out of them on each visit.’

- Rachel Leedham

As a rising star in hospitality design, with a global portfolio of luxury restaurants and hotels, Joyce has clearly mastered her own art of storytelling. One of her latest projects for exclusive London members’ club, The Arts Club, saw Joyce and her team reimagining the newly expanded Japanese restaurant Kyubi. ‘It was fascinating to marry the backdrop of a traditional Georgian townhouse with our interpretation of the Meiji period, when Japan embraced Western influences for the first time,’ notes Joyce, whose richly textured scheme fuses traditional Japanese arts and crafts with colonial and mid-century references.

Her studio was also tasked with designing the club’s new cigar lounge Oscuro. ‘Part of our brief was to appeal to non-cigar smokers as well, so we wanted to create a freshness you wouldn’t normally associate with a cigar lounge,’ she says of the space, which unites tobacco-hued timbers with exuberant florals; the adjoining terrace, meanwhile, flaunts a lush living wall.