Cover Hero Design Group crafted a Connaught Road family office where design breeds calm, trust, and quiet authority (Photo: Courtesy of Harold de Puymorin)
Hero Design Group crafted a Connaught Road family office where design breeds calm, trust, and quiet authority (Photo: Courtesy of Harold de Puymorin)
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At a new family office on Connaught Road, Hero Design Group has turned design psychology into a quiet instrument of financial trust, proving that the most powerful rooms say everything before anyone speaks
Before a term sheet is signed or a portfolio reviewed, a room built for serious financial conversation has already done considerable work. The quality of light, the weight of a material underfoot, the ceiling’s height— these are not incidental. For the discerning client arriving to discuss the future of a family’s wealth, they are, in fact, the first conversation.
This understanding was central to the brief Hero Design Group received for a new Hong Kong wealth management and family office on Connaught Road, opposite Exchange Square. The clients grasped something that most corporate commissions do not: that their physical environment was not a backdrop to their business, but an instrument of it. The task, then, was not just to design an attractive office. It was to design one capable of establishing trust—the kind needed to underpin serious financial relationships.
Above Around the bar are a set of chip-carved walnut bar stools, upholstered in velvet El Sabio Fabric by Gaston y Daniela in Chocolate (Photo: Courtesy of Harold de Puymorin)
Above Joseph Tong’s Memory Gospel, Part I—a striking composition of ink, charcoal, and aqueous inkjet on bamboo—hangs above a bespoke sofa and curated bucket armchairs (Photo: Courtesy of Harold de Puymorin)
Around the bar are a set of chip-carved walnut bar stools, upholstered in velvet El Sabio Fabric by Gaston y Daniela in Chocolate (Photo: Courtesy of Harold de Puymorin)
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Hero Design Group’s response was residential rather than corporate. Where conventional wealth management interiors reach for authority through dark tones and formal symmetry, this approximately 2,000 sq ft, 20th-floor space pursues it through restraint, warmth and spatial intelligence. Walls were reconfigured, ceilings raised, alcoves introduced; each decision guided by design psychology and calibrated to produce a sense of ease rather than imposition. The underlying philosophy, as Hero Design Group frames it, is that an effective work space should also be a welcoming venue for hosting.
Wealth management businesses have specific regulatory and operational requirements: privacy, security, compartmentalisation. But these were approached not as constraints, but as design opportunities. For example, glass partition walls extend the visual field across distinct zones, sustaining light and openness while satisfying compliance, resulting in a space that feels generous without being exposed; professional without being cold.
This office features custom timber cabinetry and a signature two-piece desk by Hero (Photo: Courtesy of Harold de Puymorin)
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Materials were selected as much for how they age as for how they look now. Travertine, wood, bronze, leather and stone, set against a palette of beige, soft grey and tobacco tones informed by feng shui principles, project quiet confidence over ostentation. Every piece of furniture, from the seating, desks and tables to a custom bar island, was designed and manufactured in-house by Hero Design Group, producing a coherence of object, material and space achievable only when a single creative intelligence governs the whole.
The result is a room that has made its argument before anyone has sat down. And in the world of private wealth, where trust is the only currency that truly matters, the implications are profound.
