MEETING
Tony Chi Creator of poetic spaces with a soul, Tony Chi places people at the heart of his luxury hotel designs. Here he shares details of his landmark projects across Asia and his passion for creative development. Words: Neena Dhillon | Photography: Courtesy of Mandarin Oriental, Taipei (unless otherwise stated)
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always gravitated to designing public, rather than private projects. He’s a social creature who prefers to stay at a friend’s house when he travels – indeed, he couldn’t imagine visiting a city for pleasure unless he knew somebody who lived there. He admits to finding the hotel environment a lonely one. Fortunately, he has many friends dotted around Asia and takes every opportunity to visit his 90-year-old father who now resides in Taipei. Taiwan remains special – it is the designer’s birthplace and the country to which he bid farewell as a young boy when his family emigrated to America in the 1960s. Upon arriving in New York – which at that time was still segregated by gritty neighbourhoods – Chi found himself on the Irish, Italian and Puerto Rican side of town. “I didn’t have many Chinese friends so communicating was a real challenge,” he recalls. “I spent a lot of time alone and to pass that time, I started to draw. You know, my parents thought I was a mute because I didn’t speak until I was five years old. Of course, nowadays, I enjoy talking very much!” Chi does speak at speed but he is equally open and quick to laugh, finding humour in the subjects we bat around. At his New York primary school, a teacher gave him paper because he couldn’t respond to questions in his new language. The boy wrote down the two words he’d seen at the airport – ‘TO NY’ – and his American name was decided for him. Young Tony, who remained passionate about drawing, went on to art school, studied architecture and planning at university, before specialising in interior design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. A period at the firm of Charles
nvisible. Dictatorial. Aggressive. Tony Chi does not shy away from non-conventional language when it comes to describing his design philosophy. But then the self-confessed “control freak” has spent the past three and a half decades developing his own design vocabulary, a vocabulary that calls for a fine balance between science and art – based on form that follows function – and in which the chaos of everyday life is contained. One gets the sense that Chi connects so productively with the hotel industry because he understands the grind of travel. When Sleeper catches up with him, he’s back at his New York studio after a week in Asia, the region where his hotels and restaurants thrive within some of the world’s most populous cities. When he presented the concept for the award-winning Park Hyatt Shanghai, he started with the word ‘silence’ because he wanted a contrast to the craziness of the streets below. That’s what he means when he talks about ‘invisible design’ – a desire for people to feel before having to think when they enter one of his hotels, for the senses to be engaged before thought. “You know, my spaces are quite dictatorial, they manipulate people in positive ways,” he explains. “I use aggressive interior architecture, drawing on a well-constructed set of parameters, to guide people, to touch them on a sensory level.” Chi’s brand of rigid interior architecture relies heavily on geometry and the idea of containment – containing the chaos of light, people and movement so effectively that his designs almost disappear. People, above all, figure largely in Chi’s thoughts. That’s why he’s
“You know, my spaces are quite dictatorial, they manipulate people in positive ways”
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