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Kinwick Centre | Revitalisation

A Landmark in the Heart of SoHo

Sector
Retail
Type
Audiovisual & Technology
|
Public Spaces
Location
Hong Kong
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Kinwick Centre | Revitalisation

A Landmark in the Heart of SoHo

Kinwick Centre, in Hong Kong Central’s fashionable SoHo district, is most widely recognised for their well-known retail tenants – PURE Fitness and Marks & Spencer Food Hall. It’s also the Headquarters and Hong Kong studio of One Space, collocated with our sister company Principle One.

So when our landlord approached us to share our ideas and inspiration for how to reposition this already well-established landmark tower, we had some 12 years of tenants’ experience on which to draw.

The client’s Brief was to ensure that the visibility of their retail tenants remained at the forefront. But also that the site’s superb location at the epicentre of Hollywood Road & Central Escalator be more fully exploited and made more memorable to the hundreds-of-thousands of passersby, customers and tenants every day. In short, this was a landmark site in need of a modernised, yet humble, expression.

We were engaged to design and deliver a complete transformation of this property’s street-level expression & interiors – including facades, streetscape, entrance lobby & reception, delivery areas and lift cars. This required us to strip back the entire podium to its concrete skeleton before redressing it.


Our most transformative intervention was to establish, for the first time, complete transparency across the entire width of the site – creating a modern, lively and welcoming experience for tenants and visitors alike. A high-contrast yet neutral palette of off-blacks and gleaming whites is paired with energy-efficient LED lighting, which connects the indoor and outdoor spaces as if the whole site is reaching out to greet the street. A finely crafted marble feature wall soars more than 10 metres high, adding a touch of sumptuous refinement as a dramatic counterpoint to our otherwise understated detailing and materiality.

Attracting passersby at both street and footbridge levels, a formerly nondescript, stand-alone 3-story column at the point of highest visibility has been reimagined as a super-sized digital totem of sorts, clad on both sides with LED surfaces carrying animated content. Here we’ve deployed state-of-the-art technology, featuring photodetectors that help reduce light pollution and energy consumption, whilst providing consistent legibility as the digital displays automatically respond to differing daylight and weather conditions.