Going, Going, Home: The Auctioneer’s Home Balances Presentation and Comfort

For a Hong Kong client whose profession is selling other people’s treasures, Via Architecture has designed a home calibrated to display his own — and to house a family at the same time

There’s a particular kind of room an auction house aspires to: enough light to read a label, enough hush to focus, enough neutrality that the object on the wall is the only thing asking for attention. It’s quite different from a domestic register. Children don’t eat breakfast in it. Nobody puts their feet on the coffee table.

The Auctioneer Home, designed by Hong Kong studio Via Architecture, argues that these two modes — the viewing room and the family room — can occupy the same footprint. The client is an auctioneer; the residence demanded space that could host both private life and gatherings of visiting collectors. Whether one register could really make space for the other is the question the project continually had to answer.

The downstairs rooms come closest to the auction-house mood. A pale beige sofa floats on a textured stone floor; a fireplace surrounded by architecturally lined render catches light at oblique angles; slatted timber screens, shot through with ribbons of mottled glass, filter the daylight. The Aqua Creations Sea of Galilee wall light at the entry — glowing through a sculptural fluted cutout — sets the atmosphere, leaving the rest of the room free to defer to whatever is brought in to be admired.

But there are a few homey tells. The swivel chair in animal-patterned upholstery doesn’t read as gallery furniture. The eight-seat marble dining table beneath Venicem’s Crown Suspension pendant is sized for a household, not a viewing. The kitchen, while lined in beige marble with grey veining, is created for working. These are the rooms where the family lives, and they sit inside the same envelope of restraint without quite being subsumed by it.

Upstairs the discipline loosens, introducing some more intriguing touches. The main bedroom suite is brightened by a sunburst-patterned headboard and textured wallpaper; the en suite bathroom, in beige marble with dual sinks, leans into an almost hotel-like theatre. The junior suite abandons the script entirely: orange-accented and youthful with an onyx-clad en suite. A third bathroom is defined by a green and white marble vanity, shot through with ripples of sea-glass emerald.

In balancing public and private, Via’s design scheme balances performance and relaxation, but even the former doesn’t sacrifice the comfort of home.

Text by Katherine Ring
Images by Victor Vieaux