One address on the antiques road that decided to stop selling and start keeping.
Peter Fung began buying Chinese hardwood furniture in the 1980s, a great deal of it from the dealers along Hollywood Road, and went on buying for something close to four decades. In February 2014 he opened four floors on that same road and put roughly four hundred pieces of it inside — huanghuali and zitan, Ming and Qing — which is a rare and slightly vertiginous thing for a collection to do. Most private museums are built at a distance from the market that fed them. This one stands in the middle of it, with the shop windows that sold him the first chairs still trading three doors down.
The second collection is the one people find harder to place beside the first: more than eight hundred European vanity cases — minaudières, compacts, powder boxes, bejewelled clutches — by Cartier, Boucheron, Van Cleef & Arpels and their peers, running from the late 1880s to the 1960s. Reported, and I have no reason to doubt it, to have begun with a single case bought at auction as a present for his wife. There are Japanese works and Western silver besides. Set out on paper it reads as two unrelated appetites; I suspect that in the room it reads as one, because both are collections of joints and closures — things made by people who cared most about the parts you are not supposed to notice.
What draws me, though, is the visiting condition. Entry is by appointment only, the price includes a guided tour, and — this is the part I have read twice to be sure of — visitors are invited to touch the furniture and, in places, to sit on it. I have spent a working life obeying the opposite instruction. To be handed a Ming chair and told that the correct way to understand it is with the flat of a hand along the underside of the rail is either the best hour I will have in Hong Kong or a habit I will find I cannot break in one morning. I would rather like to know which.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I do not publish photographs of rooms I have not stood in.