Dara Huang - Building Trust in the World of Commerce and Culture

In this podcast Yoko Choy catches up with architect Dara Huang, who runs Design Haus Liberty, with studios in London and Hong Kong; in January 2021, she is adding a furniture collection to the mix. The child of Taiwanese immigrants to the United States, Dara was born in America, where if not exactly picked on, she was made aware of her ethnic minority origins. Her father, a NASA scientist, was a positive, yet unobtrusive influence in her life, wanting only that she studied (she went to Harvard) in order to be independent and make her own choices.

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Conversation Transcript

Yoko: Hi Dara. How are you? 

Dara: Hi Yoko. How are you?

Yoko: I’m very good. I haven’t seen you for ages.

Dara: I know. It’s so nice to see you virtually. Where are you right now?

Yoko: I’m in Amsterdam.

Dara: OK, cool. Yes.

Yoko: Yes, and you’re in England, right?

Dara: I’m in London, yes, I am. At my house, in my hallway. My glamorous hallway.

Yoko: Great. How have you been?

Dara: Yes, I’ve been good. Everyone’s saying what a horrible year this is and I’m like, “This has been the best year of my life.” Professionally and personally, I just think that being locked down really suits me, but it might be, I don’t know – that I always make the best of every situation and maybe that’s what it was. I’ve just enjoyed not travelling; and working from home and getting that kind of balance back. You know what I mean? Like it’s just too hectic the way it was before, so yes, I’ve been really good. And you?

Yoko: Sounds perfect. Well, I miss a bit of the travelling, but we all have to adapt to what it is now.

Dara: Yes, that’s true.

Yoko: Tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are what do you do?

Dara: I’m an architect and I run a practice called Design Haus Liberty, which is in Hong Kong and London, and we do a lot of interiors as well. And we’re launching a furniture company in January 2021. That’s very exciting. So, what do I do? I guess I’m kind of a mom and entrepreneur and I run these two businesses. Well, same business but in two different locations.

Yoko: Cool. When did you set up the office in Hong Kong?

Dara: The office in Hong Kong – it’s crazy, because this year has literally flown by. It’s been almost two to three years now, and the London office was set up seven years ago. 

Yoko: OK, great. How has it been for you this year because we can’t travel to Asia at the moment? I guess business is still going well for you?

Dara: Yes, it’s funny. I think – I mean, I don’t know what it is but somehow business goes wherever I am. If I spend more time in Asia, then our business development goes there, and if I stay in London our business grows here. Since I’ve been here the company has grown a lot here, and I’m very happy with that because my son is here and, yes, it’s been really good. I think if I do go back out to Asia, obviously there are all these lockdown restrictions; it probably won’t be for – I don’t know. It keeps changing. I guess, I don’t know – mid next year. I hope I see you there.

Yoko: Tell us about some of the projects you’re working on at the moment. What exciting things are going on for you?

Dara: Well, all the exciting projects we’ve signed NDAs [Non Disclosure Agreements] on because that’s what they make us do, but I will say this: somehow we’ve been drawn into the sports arena of things and football stadiums; and, like, our football stadium sector picked up. I’m kidding because we never had that sector, but we’ve been doing a lot of football stadiums. I say stadiums, plural, because after we recently won one that I can’t talk about, we then were approached by three other ones – it’s crazy, right? –  which we don’t have the contracts for, but I guess we’re preparing to go into tender for. 

That’s just on top of the type of work we already do, which is institutionally led: commercial office and multi-unit retail, and we’re getting a lot more into F&B right now, like restaurants and membership clubs and spas and recreational centres. It’s like a mixed bag and in a way, I feel the company style, it keeps growing with the type of projects we’re presented with. It’s all kind of moving and developing at the same time.

Yoko: Yes, the football stadium sounds extremely interesting. How did they find you?

Dara: Most of the work that comes to the office is – this is going to sound wild, but it’s kind of like by the nature of the coincidences of where I’m at. Yoko, you know me pretty well, and you know how I love to be out there and meet people and kind of like get the word out about the business I do, and to be eating at very fancy restaurant in London; and the owner of a football team comes in and I kind of knew who he was, and anyways one thing led to another. I was like, “Oh, I’m an architect. Do you need any services by any chance?” and he just so happened to need some services and needed his stadium designed, and then it took about a year to convert that into an actual contract because there’s a very detailed process and a tender process. Obviously, all of that takes time and here we are.

Yoko: Sounds great. Yes, I always like the way you work and they way you connect to people and how you initiate conversations. There’s something very unique about you. I think it’s very interesting and inspiring for a lot of designers and architects and people working in the creative field. How do you translate design into language that your clients and investors would understand? 

Dara: Well, that’s easy. Like I said, we work with funds and developers. Probably 99% of our projects are fund and developer led, and so they really only understand one thing, which is money. You constantly have to prove that your design is going to sell and generate a lot of PR and that you’re sensitive to their budget. And I think a lot of times business development is a lot about understanding who’s standing in front of you and what their needs are and then having an ability to feed it back to them and let them understand that you value and recognise the same things that they do. Yes, and then it’s just kind of relationship building. If it’s a private client or a retail client, everybody has a different angle they want, you have to find those pinch points and you have to go into them.

Yoko: Are there any projects or examples you can share with us?

Dara: We just launched – I was on site right before we started this video, running around – a tower with Knight Dragon in Greenwich Peninsula, and it’s our first brand ID tower. SOM [Skidmore, Owings & Merrill] did the shell and core, and we did all the interiors, including the lobby, lounge, the movie theatre, all the garden terraces, the nine-penthouse collection and the communal areas. And they picked a different key designer for each tower. Tom Dixon did the one next to us, and then this is our first real brand ID debut, I guess you could say. And it’s owned by Adrian and Sonia [Cheng] of New World, in London they’re called Knight Dragon. It’s a really interesting development because they really value creativity and art and they’re using the premise of design and all these kinds of bohemian ideas and thoughts to come together and create a new development. Because Greenwich Peninsula is largely untouched in a way, it’s like starting from a blank canvas and then deciding what goes there and what happens.

Yoko: Yes, and I remember also you mentioned just after Brexit that this is a unique opportunity for you, and that if it was not for that you might not be able to create something like this.

Dara: Yes, definitely. I did an interview about being in the service industry, where you have to supply what’s in demand, if the market has changed for whatever reason, the offering is a little different. For example, the hotel industry is down, the retail industry is down; you have to go with the flow in order to stay afloat as a business. 

When Brexit happened, what happened with the high-end luxury residential sector, which used to be the best sector to be in as a developer, was that there were all these people who were afraid – uncertainty was the key word in all the news, nobody was investing in very expensive residential flats in the UK because they were uncertain what was going to happen with the taxes and their money or if the property market was going to drop. 

All of a sudden, the sales started to stagnate. Before, properties never needed a full turnkey design, but now they had to have them because when people walk into a flat and it’s fully furnished and dressed, they want to buy it far more than if they just walk into an empty building. It’s not like I really want to – you know... I love design, I’m an architect. I love architecture, but I think that when the market started to change and people needed a lot more interiors it was a lot easier to convert those contracts, and they moved quicker because you didn’t have all this on-site risk. My business went into interiors.

We basically taught ourselves the art on the job, and I met up with a bunch of interior designer friends and I asked them, “What’s your logistics? How do you procure? What’s the process?” and we just started doing interiors. And then that’s led to me now doing a furniture business, because I think that when you’re doing a service, you’re servicing something, whereas if you’re doing a product, you’re creating something and hoping that there’s a market for it. When you’re doing servicing, you’re looking at the market to feed what’s available. 

I don’t know if that makes any sense, but with the furniture, I approached it the same way – like looking at a need and then supplying it, because I was then in the interiors business and I noticed the gap in the market was that I couldn’t really find designer pieces that were affordable, and even when I could, I couldn’t pair them together – there was always something missing. Like, “I need this table. I need this. I need this,” and I couldn’t find it. Then I was like, “You know what? I’ll just make it,” Nobody has to agree with me but then if they like the look, they can also access it at an affordable price.

Yoko: Yes, that sounds really exciting. OK. Starting from the [Greenwich Peninsula] penthouse project you just mentioned, can you tell us about your design concept and how do you approach a space like that?

Dara: I’m trying to be very honest and transparent with where the inspiration comes from. And I’ll have to admit, a lot of my design influence I think came from my past, obviously, and I did work for Herzog & de Meuron in the past and I did work for a lot of international firms around the world. This idea of art and architecture and form and sculpture is really kind of embedded in the way that I think, and I do things like very sculptural things. And I do think that was largely influenced by my years at Herzog & de Meuron, because I remember I worked on 56 Leonard Street [a residential tower in New York], and it was not like cognitive that we did a lot similar concepts. 

At the end, the result was never like a one to one, but the concept of a kitchen island doesn’t have to be a square box, it can be like a sculptural form that performs as storage and as a counter unit. Our kitchen islands are all like these curved tulips coming out with like this beautiful green marble on top. And I remember at Herzog & de Meuron there were these items – basically they looked like a grand piano, and they were like these weird piano shapes. I think the influence is just like the training and the processes that you went through in life that makes you think the way you do now. 

I think a lot of the influence was my past. Another influence is from an issue we have in London; sometimes you go into these flats and you just walk straight into a hallway with cupboards on both sides, and I just hate that. It’s so unattractive. It’s like, “Welcome to my flat,” and the first thing you see is this dank hallway. It’s just really not great. We thought, OK, well why don’t we walk in and instead of seeing this nasty hallway with all these bad cupboards, we’ll kind of curve the walls so that the light really spills in, and we’ll start to create an experience where they come in and they’re like, “Wow, that’s such a cool flat,” instead of, “Oh, do I put my shoes here?” 

I think a lot of it’s also very experience led and driven, and then I think the last thing is that I’ve always been really obsessed with nature and materiality. And I think that a lot of the times we hide something that is – I don’t want to say ultimately free because you pay for marble, you pay for wood, but there’s so much processing. It’s the same with food. There’s so much processing in it, you forget its origins. In the same way that we’re eating organic food, it’s like “I want to eat organic architecture,” because it’s still beautiful just the way it is. We use a lot of raw travertine, raw marble. Like what does raw mean? It just means it’s not polished, like a polished apple that doesn’t even look like an apple anymore. 

We use concrete columns, because columns are actually steel when you’re in a tower, they’re not concrete because it’s too brittle, right? We covered our columns in this industrial material, and we used real stone tiles and we fluted them. Again, it was just like blending the steel and glass on the outside with a lot of rawness and real materials on the inside. Sorry, it’s a longwinded explanation. Lots of influences.

Yoko: It’s amazing, but how do you approach such a private space because at the end of the day this will be an apartment with a certain personality, but you don’t know who this person is yet.

Dara: Yes.

Yoko: How would you suggest to designers how to approach such a project?

Dara: Yes. I mean, I think it’s a really good question because every designer has their own style and there is no wrong or right because there’s always a market for every single style, whether you like it or you don’t like it. I guess luckily the clients that approach us kind of already know what we’re about, and they don’t mind trusting us to do something that we feel is very design oriented. And then, yes, I think that’s why for me, I guess, it’s quite fun and easy working in an industrial institutional market because, they’re professionals. 

They study the market, they always say they want international luxury, and that’s something we’re very good at – understanding the international market; understanding what we think high-net-worth people want to buy, at what market, at what price and what location. This is a penthouse in Greenwich Peninsula, it’s not Mayfair, it’s not Kensington, it’s not Soho, and we’ve done penthouses in every one of those locations and I can tell you we’ve done a different style every single time. And we’ve done penthouses in Milan – I mean, everywhere. 

We’ve done them in Hong Kong, and so every culture and every micro-location will have its own influences, but I guess at the end of the day I think people really buy into the brand and the designer. And if they think that that designer can sell, and especially in a market like London where most buyers are international, they need to find somebody with a global appeal. I think that all those are selling points that designers should think about – because you asked me a question about how I get my clients at the beginning. A lot of it is a string of proof of events in order to get that client, whichever one you’re after.

Yoko: How do you see the future of spaces? What’s the market is expecting? 

Dara: Yes. I mean, that’s a great question, because it’s funny – I was just on the phone with one of my biggest clients and we were discussing exactly this, because he’d just bought a really, really big retail portfolio. And the question was, “What’s going to happen to retail and hotel right now?” Architects focus so much on design and they don’t really think about markets, but for me my whole interest is what’s happening in the market, what’s happening in the sectors, because it influences whether or not we get hired. And I think that what’s happening right now, which happened in the office sector, but now is happening in the retail sector, is that no one’s taking long leases anymore. 

People used to take 10-year retail leases, or these large department stores were on 20-year leases, and then what we saw, even before COVID, was that they were basically going under and then these landlords were stuck with these 20-year leases that they could no longer fulfil, and they didn’t have the money to refurbish the department store. Anyways, my point is that property is changing all the time and right now with retail, I think the most common thing people keep talking about is user experience, but is that enough? My COO Rajdeep Gahir (who’s amazing) was saying what’s really been successful over COVID in terms of retail have been the onliners, right? Like the online brands, and even the small online brands.

Usually, the next step for these retail brands is that they’re going to want a small brick and mortar store to have some type of physical presence. That’s usually their next step after some sort of success in the cyberspace, and the thing with these online retailers is that they know that no retailer wants to do a 10-year lease any more. They will look at maybe a three- to five-year lease with a break, like a one- to two-year break, and so if you channel yourself into what’s happening with technology and what’s happening with the way people buy and the way people are engaging with how they’re accessing things, right now we’re on the cusp of trying to think of a new way to set a strategy for this – again, of course, providing that whole retail experience is the cool place with a niche set of very successful online retailers or whatever it is, and getting that branding of making a place there. 

But then come the ideas of how would they structure that with a landlord to make it financially successful and viable? It’s almost like design plays this part and everything else is the other part and it’s trying to think of how to mix the two in order to create sustainable ideas. And when I say sustainable, I’m not talking about – yes, of course they have to be environmentally friendly, but I think that that’s not enough focus – like, I told you at the beginning, my job is to understand what clients want and pitch an idea and show that the numbers have an ability to stack, then they will try it. Because at the end of the day everything they do is at risk of their pocket. It’s not our pockets, we’re consultants, right? But if we can think creatively, we can prove that this could be sustainable in a certain way or use proof of concepts for somewhere else. 

We were using Sheffield in New York as an example. I don’t know if you’ve been there., but Raj has and it’s basically this place where a lot of online retailers basically created this very cool shopping experience and you can go and buy things. I don’t know, because I haven’t been, I can’t say too much. But, yes, I think we need to create propositions that think somehow beyond design and are really well thought out. And then it’s up to developers and funds if they want to take the risk; and the truth is, in a time like COVID we don’t have a whole lot of time to think about not trying different things, because our bread-and-butter way of doing things isn’t working right now, right? 

In a way we have to quickly reinvent the way things are done in order to create a sustainable economy, because right now we are at risk of not really growing because we’re printing money – and everything’s closed. Yes, everyone needs to get on board basically.

Yoko: I remember you have done some retail concepts in China recently, right?

Dara: Yes.

Yoko: Are there any differences in terms of demand: what people want or what the market wants in Asia and in Europe or the rest of the world?

Dara: Yes, definitely. I think you know more than anybody that in terms of spending power and the luxury market, nothing is bigger than Asia. Asia is huge. In fact, long story short but like I was looking at the stats of luxury sales, and they’ve grown over COVID. People buying like Birkin bags. It’s insane. In a way it’s weird because the things in Asia in terms of brick-and-mortar stores are dying out, but even though it is happening in Asia they’re more willing to reinvest in redesigning them in order to get customers back in. Because the truth is the customers just don’t stop shopping. 

Whereas I think in the US you’re seeing a lot more innovation in online retails and online retailers are rethinking that process because – I don’t know, I just remember going to Soho New York and that used to be the hottest place to own a retail store and now you go there, and it’s completely desolated. And then in Asia we did a 1,200-store expansion of three brands that were basically not performing – it’s like they have faith in the idea of redesign and user experience. What’s really big in China right now is those entire outdoor shopping mall experiences. 

Do you know what I’m talking about? It’s like a village – almost like the outlet experience, equivalent in the US or Europe, I guess.

Yoko: Yes, I think people in China, they’re always looking for new experience. They don’t want to see the same thing too often; they always need new inspiration.

Dara: They’re just growing. I mean, they just like throwing money at anything. I mean, one of our biggest clients in the luxury sector is Cartier and it’s funny because they just keep coming at us with new stores and the last one was in Dalian, China. I didn’t even know where Dalian was, but the fact that they have these cities that are making enough, that they have enough people spending in cities around China that they’re going to need another Cartier, that’s like a big deal. Yes, the Chinese economy just keeps going. It’s just so buzzy. It just keeps growing, and they have a lot of capital to keep redesigning brick and mortar retail stores.

Yoko: What do you think: what’s an architect’s and a designer’s responsibility in such a developing ecosystem? In terms, of course, that if you keep building things, if you keep consuming all that – well, we have been talking a lot about environmental issues. What is your role in all this?

Dara: Well, I mean, I feel from a personal point of view this is a huge topic, right? And of course, it’s a joint effort, and if everybody doesn’t do their own part, even if it’s walking to work or whatever your part is, then we’re never going to reach the goal as a world? But I’m also a consultant. While I might push my own beliefs or I might suggest in the schedules certain suppliers that I know who have a very cradle to cradle belief in the way that they manufacture and do things, at the end of the day I can’t force my clients to think about long-term cost versus short term. I can suggest it, but at the end of the day I’m at the mercy of their desires. 

If they say to me, “I want stone from Italy,” I can say, “But I found a great local quarry, and we have some samples. I want to send them to you, and I think it’s really beautiful.” But at the end of the day, I don’t have that upper hand to make the decisions until I’m a developer with my own fund, you know. I try to lead by example. Like our furniture line is sustainably sourced; it’s all EU made. We do our best with trying to keep things very sustainable on our end, and to recommend our clients do the same.

Yoko: We all have to do our own part.

Dara: Yes. Like I said, as big or small as it is, yes, it’s even the small things we might do, like eco-wear or whatever; at the end of the day, we do our best.

Yoko: Talking about future. You are part of the Lego Group’s Rebuild the World campaign? 

Dara: That was so much fun.

Yoko: You had an idea session with 60 kids in London?

Dara: Yes.

Yoko: Before the lockdown?

Dara: Yes, that was so funny.

Yoko: Tell us more about the day.

Dara: Well, first I have to say I absolutely love and respect the Lego Group so much, not just because I think they are an incredible company in terms of promoting creativity. Of course, I played with Lego as a kid, my son plays with Lego. Being able to go through generations and still have that continuity of interest, and a singular product which is basically a tiny brick, they are an amazing business model, and it’s completely public. If you looked at the revenues of last year, they made over £5 billion simply selling Lego toys. And if you look at Forbes list of children’s most wanted gifts of 2020 of boys and girls, the number one was Lego, which is shocking because everything under that was like Xbox, it was iPhones.

The only non-analogue gift was Lego, and then there were bicycles somewhere. To create such a sustainable creative way to think, I’ve done a lot of workshops with them where we got together with other creatives like child psychologists and people from Cambridge to talk about the psychology of children, the future and how we should be promoting exercising the creative part of the brain; and why as adults we get bored, basically. And the truth is with AI and learning and all this kind of technology being formed, it’s so important that what we should do with our kids right now is exercise their creative side. AI might exist and get creative, with nuanced ideas and thinking outside of the box; that’s something that’s still very human driven. 

I think that whilst this billion-pound toy brand has all these joint ventures with IKEA, Disney or whatever, the base premise of it – and I think what makes it really successful is that it’s imagination in a box. And it’s great because you give this to a kid and they’ll take it and they’ll do anything and it’s an ice cream shop, or it’s a – one person made a grandma’s café, one person made a charging dock for electrical scooters. I mean, the creativity’s insane, and then you give it to an adult and they’re like, “Well, where’s the instructions because I’m not really sure what to do.” 

It was weird at the Lego interview; I said, “I just hope that they can just like bottle the way they think and never let it go,” because I don’t think people value the type of –I don’t want to say naivety, because these kids who were eight years old were doing vertical farming with rainwater collecting systems and human drone systems that have solar panel power charging stations. And whilst it sounds very ‘out there’, by the same token I was thinking, “Well, I could see this in 20 years.” You know, like vertical urban farming inside a house? Well, it already exists in our grocery stores here, maybe it might exist in a house. And in a way you need this. Like an eight-year-old thought of this, and an adult didn’t and so it’s like you almost needed this type of like bright-eyed, almost naïve creativity to think of something new.  

What was really cute is these little girls; they came up to me and said, “We want to be an architect,” and I was like, “Oh, gosh,” because, Yoko, you know how hard we work, but I was – you know, it was quite special because even though, yes, we work really hard, I was thinking, “These little girls are our future.” You know in whatever, 10, 20 years I’ll be not retired, but hopefully chilling and they’re going to be the ones designing our houses. And I thought, “If I influenced them just like a tiny bit to think of the world differently…” Actually, they were thinking of the world differently, I was just putting it into CGIs for them. Yes, to just not lose that magic, I think it was pretty amazing.

Yoko: Yes, super-cute. I’m sure they will remember that day with you for the rest of their life.

Dara: Well, I don’t know if they will, but I certainly will. I was like, “I’m stealing your ideas for later.”

Yoko: And talk about influences, I think your father was one of the biggest influences in your life and your work. He’s a NASA scientist?

Dara: Yes.

Yoko: Moved to the US from Taiwan in the seventies?

Dara: Yes, exactly. I don’t think – well, for one thing I don’t think kids appreciate their parents enough, because whilst we’re growing up, we don’t cognitively think of them as an influence on our life, they’re just dad, or it’s just mom, and they’re just there to make our beds and cook us food. At least that’s what my parents did. Even now when I think about my dad being an influence, it’s more like thinking about what I naturally do, and then trying to figure out why do I do it. “Well, why do I work hard and who instilled these ideas in me?” Because my parents never pushed me. 

I think people have this misconception that Asian parents are like tiger parents and they make you do things, but my parents they were very kind of like, “Do whatever you want,” and they saw that I was good at art and so they put me in a lot of art classes. And my dad would tell me things like, “If you can get a really good education, then you can support yourself,” and for him that was huge. He was an immigrant to America, so he would say, “You have to speak the language because you have an Asian face and so people will expect you to understand the language.” And he used to also say, “Because you do have a different face, you need to work harder than a lot of other people.”

What he meant was that there’s discrimination in this world, and if you’re just average then you can’t compete in this kind of market. And, again, it’s wasn’t tiger parenting, but I do think that this is the way that he came in as an immigrant and climbed up the ranks, and he was telling me the reality of the world is that these are the things that you have to do, being an immigrant really. And even though I wasn’t an immigrant, I was an American, I think he was trying to help me relate to the reality of the way the world thinks. And he was always like that, he never sugar-coated anything. He told me, “Being an architect is a very laborious job.” He was always being realistic with me, and I think I appreciated that, and he always tutored me through high school and college in physics and math. 

He always told me to do the right thing, no matter what. I know that sounds obvious, and I think one thing he always taught me, which I really appreciate and, again, I didn’t realise these were mentoring things – they’re just things your parents tell you – was to make my own living and make my own money. And I think that – I’m not trying to turn this into like a female, male thing – but I think that a lot of women feel a little bit trapped in their lives if the man is constantly providing for everything. And all my dad ever wanted for me and my sister was just freedom, like the ultimate freedom to make our own decisions and be able to see them through because we weren’t relying on anybody for our money. 

That was another thing he drilled into us is like, “Do not borrow cash from anybody. Do not own a credit card if you can’t pay it back. Don’t buy that if you can’t afford it.” And so all these little financial ticks were very much driven at a super-early age. I think even as a business owner – and I’m not going to say I’m the best person with cash, that’s why I have three people on my financial team – it’s about being conservative with what you have. 

I remember when I was younger, I said to my dad – because he was getting older, “Dad, don’t worry. I promise before you go, you’ll get that chance to walk me down the aisle and see that a guy’s going to take care of me,” and my dad looked at me and said, “Dara, all I’ve ever wanted in my life is to know that you can take care of yourself, and that’s where you are.” And I was like, “Oh my God, thank God,” because my parents are super traditional and so I thought – that even though I have always taken care of myself for Christ’s sake, and that’s where I am, ultimately and I’m very proud of that, I always thought that because they came from a very traditional background of, you know, the guy taking care of everything, that they wanted that for me. 

My mom, because she’s really traditional, maybe still thinks that way, but I think my dad, also being very modern in the way he was thinking, really influenced me a lot. And I think it really helped me – you know, I love empowering females, I love giving people a chance. That’s like something that’s very close to my heart. It’s not something they drilled into me, but I think it’s something that my dad has always been very honest about, and he just never wanted to see us stuck. 

He paid for my Harvard tuition because he wanted to make sure that that was his investment for me. It was like my gift that I could keep giving back to myself, and of course being Asian, I also want to take care of my mom if, God forbid, anything happens to him one day. It’s like very much about us giving back. I mean, you know how it goes, it’s like as soon as you graduate college, they’re like, “Are you going to send us some money?” It’s like, “Yes, great.”

Yoko: It’s priceless and I’m sure your parents are very proud of you now.

Dara: I don’t know, I never really ask them.

Yoko: Yes, but even for a woman, you can have your career, you can be married, you can be happy, you can do whatever you want, there’s no boundary. It’s not that you can have one thing and you can’t have the other.

Dara: It’s funny, because we live in these really modern times, and the way we do things are all changing. In our parents’ generation the woman was in charge of childcare but now both parents are part of the child’s life, and it’s the same with work. Both genders are hands on with the household care, they’re both hands on with bringing the bacon to the table too, you know what I mean? And I think it’s a very healthy mentality to contribute on all levels and have your counterbalance also contribute on household levels as well. But, yes, whatever, there’s no right answer and I’m supportive of every way to do things. By no means I’m saying this is the way to go. 

Yoko: Yes, and not so long ago you posted quite a personal message on Instagram about your struggle growing up being Asian in a Western society. 

Dara: Well, it… 

Yoko: How did you overcame it and turn it into your strength and opportunities?

Dara: Oh, gosh. I think that’s just like a demographic thing, you know what I mean? I think it was just – I grew up in a really small town, and so it’s not like I had to do anything. It was more like the surroundings around me were really, really changing, and then I – you know, I have an office in Hong Kong. And I think what’s really interesting and strange is like when I’m in America I’m Asian, when I’m in Asia I’m American, right. Like what I’ve realised is, “Look, I’m a global citizen.” 

I’m completely happy with that, and now I reside in London; by the way, I’ve been here for ten years and I have never once in my life heard the term ‘white’ in London, because nobody is ‘white’ here. Everybody’s like German, Czech, they’re Russian, they’re French, they know where they’re from. They’re American if they’re here, they’re not white, they’re American. It just so happens that I was born in America. I’m very proud of that. I love America. I love being American, but the irony is it’s a country that’s made up of immigrants who have obviously occupied it for a few hundred years and have their identity as being American now. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it was much harder growing up in a small town in America than travelling the world and experiencing things. I don’t think that my level of confidence changed with the racial implications. I think to be quite honest, and I say this to women all the time, it’s actually changed with age, and I know that women fear aging for some reason, but I really like it – it’s made me so much more confident when I turned 30 for some reason. I didn’t feel like a kid, I felt like my opinion was heard. Like I could stand up and speak and it mattered. 

And for some reason, in my twenties my first jobs were always in corporate offices from Herzog & de Meuron to Fosters. I don’t know why; I was afraid to say what I thought. I thought that all these men around me were telling me what to do and, I don’t know, I just felt like my opinion didn’t matter; I couldn’t say anything on site. And it was so silly, because if I go back and I think of my younger self, I wish that I knew what I knew now, but it took being older and experienced to realise that like being a young woman we harness so much power. I swear, we do. 

Now I don’t worry that I’m aging because I think, “Oh, I feel so much more confident than I did as a young woman and where I am now.” I don’t know, because I don’t know what I’ll be like in my forties or my fifties, but maybe by the time I’m in my sixties I’ll be like, “Oh wow. I wish I knew now what I didn’t know when I was in my thirties and was trying to prove myself all the time.” Because I do think that we go through these ten-year gaps where we are on a different agenda, and I heard this from the CEO of Coca Cola who’s actually an Asian woman, right? And she was saying, in her thirties it’s all about the years of proving yourself, and I do think that to some extent it’s true, because you go from this GenX a little bit lost. 

All of a sudden, you’re 30 and “Yes, I’ve found myself, but now how do I formulate that?” And then once you kind of get what you’re good at you need to convince all these people that, “I can do this,” because you’re like still running the rat race and trying to build a portfolio. And then when you’re in your forties it’s, “OK, peace, chilling. I’ve done my portfolio. Hire me or don’t, or I’ll find another client, and goodbye.” The business is seven years old, and I feel like, yes, it has been a lot like that, like pitching and trying to prove myself and then feeling a lot more comfortable with myself now. 

Yes, again, I don’t know where that confidence came from – I think it’s just changing your location; even though I when I was young, and I think I wrote that I was teased for being Asian, it’s not something that was mentally scarring or anything, you know what I mean? It was just something that I remember happening, and I remember thinking, “I don’t have a choice over this. I was born this way. How can you hold something against me that like I can’t change?” And now I quite like it – I don’t know. I mean, you too, don’t you love being an Asian woman? I think it’s so cool. 

Like I was saying, it’s kind of USP. I connect with other women, especially other Asian women and we’ve got – well, we look young for a long time, you know. We’re like a growing sector in a market that’s economically booming. In a way I think being a global citizen is the best citizen to be because it means that you can insert yourself around the world, and Yoko you do it beautifully, you’re in freaking Amsterdam right now, and you just blend in. And beauty is really within, right? 

If you go into a country with a stinky attitude, no one’s going to warm to you. You’re a global citizen, you’re used to assimilating yourself, eating different foods, meeting different people. People will just think you’re a beautiful person inside, and so it doesn’t matter if you’re Asian or whatever colour or whatever you are, it’s all about attitude at the end of the day, right?

Yoko: Yes, I agree. You need to have an open heart to embrace or to respect others’ culture.

Dara: Yes, absolutely and again, I think with so much travel that I’ve done, there’s just no tolerance for ignorance. It doesn’t work. At the end of the day, I’m just being myself, as are you, and it’s like if you’re a nice human being then like it’s just a lovely place to be, isn’t it? We don’t have to be anywhere.

Yoko: What’s your plan for Christmas? Are you travelling anywhere?
Dara: Oh my God. Yoko, I have become like Suzie housemaker. I’m not joking. My favourite thing to do is to buy a bunch of arts and crafts and – you can probably see on my Instagram. I like to glue stuff to my tree. Like the craziest things. I’m making Christmas décor. I realise that people are probably not going to be travelling and experiencing Christmas like they used to, a lot of people will be staying at home. 

While it seems a little bit frivolous to post things like, ‘I bought this on Amazon for £7.99’ I think in a way I’m – look, I’m not my client, right? I couldn’t afford to hire myself, I really couldn’t. Like I don’t have – I don’t want to throw any numbers, it’s going to scare people from being my clients, but I don’t have an unlimited pot of cash right here to just pour into my interiors. As a real person, and I’m renting my place, I want to show how accessible it is to make it nice and cosy regardless of your budget, because a lot of things are actually about taste. 

And I think a lot of people are missing that component where they’re like, “Actually…” I’m doing this whole Instagram story about when you’re decorating a tree, you should come up with a concept and a colour theme before just going for it. If you want a designer tree. If you want to bring Christmas home. Because the truth is it’s, “Yes, I’m staying in London for Christmas,” as are a lot of people who would’ve probably travelled abroad. And it’s really important that we get that spirit, especially if people are here alone and they don’t have their families.