158 - Travel & Leisure - Dutch Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong

Passing the pen
Eating by numbers
Thank you Hans, Pen received! What keeps amazing me about Hong Kong and China
is the obsession with food – and numbers! I still remember the conversation I had
with my first (and last) Hong Kong boss:
“Sjoerd, when will you retire?”
“With sixty-five, I guess?”
“Sixty-five years?”
“No, sixty-five million!”
Rolling laughter followed - but it could also be that what made my boss laugh was the
absurd notion of me ever having sixty-five million dollars in my bank account at the rate
that he was paying me… I quit the job not long after and started my own business.
I initially arrived in Hong Kong from Japan in 1995, on a stopover from Tokyo back to
Amsterdam. I was too intrigued by Asia to return to the Netherlands that soon. I found
work as an interior designer. My wife (then girlfriend) Esther joined me a year later.
We called our newly founded design consultancy ‘Three Dogs ‘, after the boisterous bunch
of mongrels we inherited from the previous tenant of our studio space. In ten years or so
we built the company into a retail interior design and visual merchandising specialist
serving local and international clients.
Our projects can be found anywhere from Seoul to Istanbul, with the majority in China and
Hong Kong. We have helped you get a SmarTone subscription, buy a pair of Crocs and order
a coffee at Caffe Habitu-The Table. Our latest project is the creation of space to appreciate
the beauty of art, with the design of the blockbuster Picasso exhibition at the Heritage
Museum in Hong Kong. See more of our work on our website http://www.threedogs.hk
I’d think one of the reasons we’ve succeeded is that we’ve been able to adapt our
straightforward, witty Dutch design sensibility to the local taste. Probably the best way to
illustrate this is by looking at how the annual gift for our clients has developed over the years.
Our very first present was incredibly cool – or so we thought. It was a small desktop
clock, with a little dog on the second hand, chasing the bones that made up the minute
and hour hands. On delivering the finished clocks, our supplier was so kind to point out
that by giving someone a clock, you essentially wished death upon them.
“But”, he added cheerily, “Since you are foreigners, it doesn’t matter!”
We have come a long way since. This Chinese New Year, we gave away boxes of exclusive
Long Yin ‘Dragon’ tea, which was much appreciated. But our clients’ favorite so far was
our gift in the Year of The Ox: dried beef jerky.
It’s still a few years to go but we’re already agonising over the gift for the Year of the Rat.
For a box-fresh view of Hong Kong, I will pass the pen to Cees de Bont, who has recently
been appointed to Dean of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, School of Design.
Talking Point
By Sjoerd Hoekstra,
sjoerd@threedogs.hk
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