Knitwear designer Madeleine Thompson has experienced two lives in this five-storey house in Hong Kong’s Pok Fu Lam. The first, as a child, when the house – larger as it was joined to the one nextdoor – belonged to her parents. The second, as a married mother of three young children, after half of the house was passed down to her as a wedding present. 

Much was done to put Madeleine and her husband’s stamp on the place. To begin, the house, built in the seventies, was completely gutted, with the help of Sue Loughry and Madeleine Ashwin of SLINC Design, ensuring that period features such as the half-moon windows were restored. “We doubled the size of the kitchen to create a proper space where we could hang out, and put in crittal windows between the kitchen and the double-height dining room that we converted from an outdoor courtyard,” says Madeleine. “We wanted the kitchen to have the feeling of a French farmhouse,” decorated with pendant lamps sourced in France and a French dresser bought from Hong Kong’s Bowerbird. Due to the height of the dining room, the couple commissioned artist Hugo Dalten to create a light installation to be projected onto one of the walls, making an interesting contrast to the room’s traditional display of blue and white antique china, inherited from Madeleine’s parents. “I wanted the room to feel almost like a gallery space,” says Madeleine.   

On the lower ground is a sitting room, mirrored on one side and with an open fireplace. The room leads out onto a jungle-like garden with vines and bougainvillea growing up the walls either side, and with views overlooking the sea and the hilltops of Lantau island beyond. In one corner of the garden, the couple have built a brick pizza oven – a hit with the children. “We all make pizzas – it’s such a fun, collaborative thing to do,” says Madeleine. Above the sitting room is a less formal snug room, with two walls occupied by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, holding books and travel trinkets. “I try to bring something back from all the places we visit. I think that’s such a nice thing to do, as a memory,” says Madeleine. It’s in this room that Madeleine works when she’s not at her Lai Chi Kok studio managing the design and production of her knitwear collections, or in London where her sales team is based. “My iPhone is my office really,” Madeleine says, who credits a relatively new-found love of Instagram for connecting her to her customers who buy from her direct or from retailers including Net-A-Porter and Harvey Nichols. 

The next storey up from the snug is the children’s wing of two bedrooms, a bathroom and a playroom, before reaching Madeleine and her husband’s bedroom, where a Claybrook bathtub overlooks the sea, and a spare bedroom and roof terrace above that. The whole house feels free-flowing and open, yet each space confined and cosy, largely as an effect of the decor, for which Madeleine wanted to recreate the feeling of a London townhouse, having lived between London and Hong Kong.