“We had this thing in front of us for one year while we were working on the drawings,” said architect Gilles Vanderstocken, brandishing a thermos-sized cylinder of concrete. It’s a coring sample from the structural frame of the building at 10 Sik On Street in Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district, a modest residential building that he and his wife and partner Charlotte Lafont-Hugo have converted into a permanent home for the art gallery Kiang Malingue. It brings together the two specialties of their studio Beau Architects: adaptive reuse and exhibition spaces.
As the story goes, Vanderstocken and Lafont-Hugo relocated to Hong Kong from Brussels 12 years ago—”the Year of the Dragon,” Lafont-Hugo noted—and started Beau two years later, when gallerists Edouard Malingue and Lorraine Kiang commissioned the architects’ inaugural project: a different incarnation of the gallery. This most recent one is the eighth project Beau has done with the duo.
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