“Go crazy.” It sounds like liberation – but total creative freedom can be as paralysing as it is exciting. Not for Paul Tse Yi-pong. In 2018, when Allan Poh handed the co-founder of New Office Works (NOW) the keys to his holiday house in Haikou, Hainan, the brief was as boundless as the island sky. The result helped announce the then-fledgling studio’s arrival on Hong Kong’s design and architecture scene.

“I was very lucky to have a client as open-minded as him,” says Tse. He adds that while Poh – the Singaporean co-founder of Finnish spring water brand Jääde – encouraged him to be as unconventional a designer as possible, both drew the line at functionality.

What followed were two and a half years of design iteration and refinement, and a further two years of construction – all sustained by conversation between the pair, friends since their late teens, when they connected in Australia over a love of skateboarding. That their bond remains strong says much about the collaboration. “We have similar tastes and sensibilities,” Tse says, to which Poh responds, on our group call, that Tse is welcome to stay whenever he likes in the home of his making.

Both had recognised the possibility offered by the now one-bedroom, 1,612 sq ft, fifth-floor duplex, delivered as a bare concrete shell. But what immediately excited Tse and NOW’s other co-founder, Evelyn Ting Huei-chung, was the 5.5-metre-high ceiling, a height rarely encountered in Hong Kong’s residentials. “We were thinking, ‘How can we do little buildings – little architecture – inside this space?’” he recalls. In NOW’s early drawings, several steel-framed structures, each housing a different function, made up the duplex. And then it evolved.

What the final design kept, and what it discarded, is instructive. The quasi-industrial aesthetic remained, expressed in steel balustrades with metal mesh. So did the idea of a small internal structure – distilled into a bold, concrete-encased stairwell with a spiral staircase made of steel and cherry wood at its heart. What fell away was the obvious complexity.

And all of this was achieved despite an inverted floor plan. Where other owners in the complex may have chosen to maximise floor area – with bedrooms above, living areas below – Tse flipped the logic, preserving in the process a priceless double-height void.