The artisans behind Hong Kong’s woodworking revival

In 1960s Hong Kong, timber was big business. The city was full of carpenters building everything from boats to fine furniture to simple tables, chairs and stools. But the shift of the industry to mainland China after the 1980s left many talented woodworkers without an outlet for their skills. Today, there is something of a revival taking place, with a small but dedicated number of woodworkers making custom furniture and wood objects in local studios, mostly tucked away in Hong Kong’s industrial areas. “Almost all of us know each other,” says Filip Winiewicz, whose company, Hardwood HK, makes bespoke hardwood furniture. “It’s competition but in a friendly way. Everyone has their own area of expertise.” Some of those woodworkers are making high-concept furniture designed with digital tools, while others are focusing on traditional joinery and historically inspired pieces. Some use salvaged materials and local Hong Kong wood while others seek out the best quality timber from overseas. To learn more, we reached out to five local woodworkers, each with a distinctive approach to design, fabrication and woodcraft, to understand why wood is making a comeback in Hong Kong. Coutou Woodworking Studio In 2017, Arthur Li Kin-shing and Yung Wing-yan wanted to build a bridge between Hong Kong’s history of industrial woodworking and the growing number of people interested in taking up crafts. That led them to start Coutou, a collaborative studio in To Kwa Wan that brings together sifu – masters – with anyone interested in learning about woodcraft. Another motivation: reducing waste. “Our workshop is really close to a park and also a rubbish depot,” says Li. “We always see a lot of [discarded] old furniture, and they always trim the trees.” The team at Coutou salvages old furniture and discarded wood, along with tree trimmings from the park, to upcycle them into new wooden objects. They also source local wood from Roy Ng Ting-ho, a woodworker himself who runs Studio 818, as well as a small sawmill. “Hong Kong wood has really nice patterns and colours that other trees [from Europe and North America] don’t have,” says Li. “Usually for furniture we use walnut, oak and ash [from the United States], but in Hong Kong we also have lychee and other trees.” Since the studio was founded, well over a thousand students have taken Coutou’s classes, which teach everything from basic woodworking skills to the advanced joinery techniques needed to make Ming-style furniture. For commercial projects, Coutou has also paired designers with its roster of four masters, each with his own unique skill set. “The masters we work with always have an open mind about new materials and techniques,” says Li. One of them was pleased to discover that locally salvaged acacia was just as appealing in Ming-style furniture as the more traditional rosewood. In another project, a shelving system for an art gallery, they created a more contemporary look by pairing brass elements with traditional burr-puzzle joinery, a traditional Chinese method that assembles furniture through interlocking pieces of wood rather than screws or nails. It’s this combination of innovation and hard-won knowledge that Li hopes will help local woodworking thrive in Hong Kong. “The masters have got a different point of view to what you see in books or on the internet,” he says. “They do what they do really well, but they need help to spread their knowledge.” Hardwood HK Filip Winiewicz studied to become an architect in Poland, but when he ended up settling in Hong Kong in 2014, after stints in Dublin, Beijing and Kuala Lumpur, he realised, “Hong Kong is not a good place for architects.” He spent most of his time as an architectural designer working on shopping malls and concepts that would never see the light of day. “I’d always had the feeling that I wanted to do something more with my hands,” he says. So he decided to start working with wood. He initially approached a local carpenter to see if he could work as an apprentice. “He said no, I will cut off my fingers,” says Winiewicz. “He didn’t want the trouble.” Instead, he began dabbling in projects in his Lamma Island backyard. On a return trip to Poland, to visit family, Winiewicz found himself in awe of the variety of hardwood timber available. “In Hong Kong it’s hard to get nice material,” he says. So he ended up importing an entire container of ash, walnut and oak and renting a warehouse in Kwai Chung to store it. The initial plan was to sell the timber and work on personal projects. But it turned out there were more people looking for custom furniture than Winiewicz had expected. He soon had enough work that he was able to leave his day job and focus on woodworking full time. After two years on his own, he hired a few trained carpenters to help him. “For me it was just try, fail and learn,” he says. “But when I got more orders, I heard some advice that you should hire people better than you. So the carpenters I work with have better skills.” Winiewicz’s own taste in furniture tends to lean towards the contemporary, and he also works with plywood, but his business is client-driven. He’ll develop a design and work with his carpenters to execute it. “That’s where being [trained as] an architect helps,” he says. Sometimes the requests are totally unexpected, such as when a doctor asked him to create a rolling hotpot table with a wood frame and two induction burners under an artificial stone top. He also finds satisfaction in more conventional projects, such as a “floating” mahjong table with an ink-stained ash top and walnut legs, which, he says, turned out to be one of his favourite pieces. He says woodworkers in Hong Kong must deal with strong competition from mainland China, where custom-made furniture can be had for much less than what it costs locally. But his clients like the collaborative, hands-on experience of using a local workshop. “[It] is noisy and full of dust, but clients like coming anyway to sketch out the details, see the progress,” he says. “And if something’s not right with the final product, we’ll fix it and refinish it.” Winiewicz’s goal is to scale up that experience, not by making individual pieces of furniture, but by working on entire houses and apartments, including supplying kitchens. For a home in Clear Water Bay designed by Emma Maclean & Co, he crafted everything from the cabinetry to the bookcase-cum-doors. “Our biggest project was a two-storey villa in Sheung Shui where we designed everything in the house,” he says. “That’s probably the project I’m most proud of.” Zou-Mat In 2019, Charis Mok Shu-wai and Jesse Hao Lap-hang opened their design studio Zou-Mat with the goal of combining woodcraft with contemporary design. “We wanted to explore different ways of making and approaching design,” says Hao. “We both come from an architecture and design background, so that really informs a particular approach to what we can do with design and making. We often try and integrate a multidisciplinary approach to making. We usually emphasise a lot of contextual elements as well as integrating digital design and fabrication methods, and more traditional hands-on skills.” Mok and Hao collaborate on the designs, which are then executed by Hao in the Fo Tan workshop they share with Roy Ng, who cures and cuts local timber, particularly Taiwanese acacia trees that are being felled for slope maintenance. “It’s a very dense, very tough wood,” says Hao. “We’re working a lot with that at the moment. We also do walnut, white oak – the typical hardwood species.” That spirit of experimentation extends beyond the material itself to the techniques they use to build with it. Hao uses parametric design tools to create forms that would be hard to replicate by hand. (Parametric design uses an algorithmic process to create complex 3D models.) “If it requires a lot of precision or intricacy then I will try to control it with digital fabrication like laser cutting, laser engraving or CNC milling,” says Hao, referring to computer-guided milling machines. “But if it’s joinery that is easily done with a typical saw or chisel – hand-cut joinery – then I’ll do that. I try to find a balance.” Hao says the design duo has a “particular obsession” with pairing live-edge wood with more geometric forms. This is reflected in several of their projects, such as Moon, a table that combines a live-edge slab of walnut with spindle-like legs on one side and desk drawers on the other. “We first sourced the tabletop, the walnut slab, and thought about how we can showcase it,” says Hao. “We tried to integrate the offcuts of the slab, so in this case the faces of the drawers are actually from the same slab. We cut it down into thinner pieces.” Zou-Mat’s latest project involves recycling wood found inside a historic building currently under renovation. (The restoration project is still officially under wraps, with an announcement expected next year.) “There was some old furniture from the 1940s and it’s of quite good-quality teakwood,” says Mok. The designers will break down the furniture and other materials to use them in various ways. “If there’s particular joinery – like if it’s tongue-and-groove flooring – we’ll try to use that structure and put it back into the design,” says Hao. “Right now we’re still working on several ideas.” Screw Up Studio Most woodworkers are fascinated by the material qualities of wood, but Screw Up Studio founder Obie Chan Shung-lek sees it more as a means to an end. “We quite like the quality of pinewood because it’s easier to design and build with,” he says. “And we often use birch plywood, a high quality type of plywood that you can find at Hong Kong wood retailers. We think of how to use one single sheet of plywood when we’re working on many different projects. You have to imagine how to cut this sheet into parts to be cost-efficient.” Chan says he was inspired by his construction worker father. “That was a big influence for me to start working with wood,” he says. “When I was a kid I started to play with drills and screws.” Chan went on to study interior design at Polytechnic University, and for his final year project, he rented a tong lau flat with several other students, brought in all the tools and materials they needed and kitted it out from top to bottom. He liked the experience enough that he vowed not to seek employment after graduation but to start his own studio instead. “I just wanted to do my own stuff, design and build my own objects, furniture, small-scale interior projects,” he says. That was nearly 10 years ago. Since then, Screw Up Studio has worked on a wide range of projects, often in collaboration with local architects and designers. Two years ago, Chan and his team used birch plywood and woodworking chute slides – a metal track normally used to hang tools in a wood shop – to create a flexible shelving system for Whatever Coffee, a cafe in Sham Shui Po. They also worked on a design – by Napp Studio and Architects with Chinese University – to create an ash-framed hawker cart with an oak countertop and canvas awning. “It aims to preserve the cultural heritage of Shui Hau Tsuen, in South Lantau, by allowing visitors to experience food making by local villagers,” says Chan. Most recently, Chan’s studio combined birch plywood with green-tinted acrylic to create a portable vinyl DJ booth for HAHA, a restaurant in Kam Tin. Screw Up is currently working on tables for a local restaurant that mix wood with upcycled materials such as old billiard balls that will serve as bag hooks. None of these projects are made entirely of wood, and, for Chan, that’s the point. “We don’t look for simplicity in a woodworking project, we look for complexity,” he says. “We like to mix things and add more and more details, maybe not with wood but with other materials. When you use more than just one material, the accuracy of putting different parts and materials together really comes on the table. When you see the finished product you easily know if it’s done by a good craftsman or not.” Yat Muk A little under 10 years ago, Ken Chow Kin-lung was looking for a job that would allow him to make things with his hands. “There’s a lot of crafts you can try in Hong Kong,” he says. He tried leatherwork and sewing, and enjoyed both, but didn’t see himself doing it for a living. Then he tried woodworking. “It felt like fate.” In 2016, he travelled to Taiwan to study woodworking full time. He returned to Hong Kong and interned at two local wood shops, taking time off to travel around Taiwan and mainland China to learn from woodworkers in those places. Now he runs his own studio, Yat Muk, where he makes chairs, explores traditional joinery and runs public workshops. Chow often works with local designers, especially Keith Chan Shing-hin of Hintegro. “It’s not like a client relationship,” says Chow. “He’s more like a mentor.” Together they have worked on cabinets, tables and chairs for many of the residential and commercial projects designed by Chan and his team, who lean towards a minimalist, Japanese-inspired aesthetic. As for his own style, Chow says he is still exploring what he likes. He is particularly proud of a Ming-style chair he made in Taiwan, but less for its appearance and more for the technical skills he had to learn to build it. That focus on the making process has led him to work on a large variety of projects. Made in collaboration with woodcarving workshop Hop Keung Cheong Kee, Arise in Gallops is a mahjong table featuring intricate scenes of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour on two sides and the Thames in London on the other two. At the other end of the aesthetic spectrum are decidedly contemporary objects such as a wooden version of the stackable plastic stools found in countless Hong Kong restaurants, or an angular A-shaped chair whose shape evokes the Chinese character for wood or tree (木). Chow says he is focused on refining his skills. “I still feel like a student.” But that attitude is also what inspires him to share his knowledge. He runs woodworking classes for children and adults, teaching them basic skills but also more advanced techniques for people who, like him, are serious about their interest in wood. “There are a lot of introductory courses in Hong Kong,” he says. “That’s not a bad thing – there are lots of people who just want to try it out as a hobby. But a few hours is not a real woodworking experience. My main area of focus is one-on-one instruction. They can come here as a blank slate and I’ll teach them everything.”