Star System

A galaxy of architects, artists and designers join forces to create an out-of-this-world art and retail experience in Hong Kong.

- Catherine Shaw

On a late evening in July, billionaire Hong Kong developer Adrian Cheng points a laser beam at a single light bulb, one of 1,800 scattered across the ceiling of the 35m-high atrium in his newest and most ambitious project yet. The atmosphere Cheng wants to create is that of a sparkling galaxy, and this is best achieved through a diverse range of lighting intensities, so he is identifying each light and adjusting their illumination one by one.

The process is painstaking, but Cheng has spent ten years considering almost every detail of his bold new ten-storey retail-and-art complex, designed to appeal to brand-savvy millennials. The project is very personal.

K11 Musea is the last segment of the ambitious US$2.6bn Victoria Dockside cultural district on a 28-hectare site on the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. Originally known as Holt’s Wharf, the district was an important railway hub before it was bought in 1971 by Cheng’s grandfather, the local hotel and property magnate Cheng Yu-Tung, who turned it into New World Centre, a retail, hotel, residential and office complex. It was closed in 2009 to allow for the redevelopment, which already includes a 65-storey Tony Chi-designed Rosewood flagship hotel, the K11 Atelier office tower, and the 21-storey K11 Artus residences, with interiors by architect André Fu. K11 Musea, camouflaged with a 5,000 sq m living garden façade, is the collaborative effort of 100 architects, artists, craftsmen, conservationists and designers, working with James Corner Field Operations and Kohn Pedersen Fox. ‘I don’t think one person can do everything, so that is why we have so many designers and one person – me – to pull it together,’ Cheng says of this unusual, multi-designer approach.