André Fu on Design Beyond the Signature and Scale

Sep 16

9 min read

Updated: Sep 17

Portrait of André Fu (Courtesy of André Fu Studio)

As André Fu Studio marks its 25th year, André Fu seems less interested in defining a signature than in protecting the conditions that allow design to remain personal.

The timing invites reflection. His third monograph, André Fu: A Designer’s Vision, arrives through Assouline as the studio reaches this milestone. Across 280 pages and a broad sector of hospitality projects in Asia and Europe, the book considers his practice through three recurring ideas: heritage reinterpreted, escape, and cultural dialogue. It is less a conventional retrospective than an examination of the thinking that has accumulated beneath the work.

“I do not need someone to walk into a room and immediately say, ‘This is André Fu.’ I would rather they resonate with it because they feel a personal touch.”

When we met in Hong Kong, however, our conversation kept returning to something less visible. Fu spoke about the years required to understand a city, the trust that has to exist before a designer can interpret someone else’s story, and the small decisions through which an interior gradually takes form.

Then came one of the clearest observations of the conversation. For Fu, the challenge of an international practice is not simply how to grow, but how to preserve involvement.

“Design itself is not scalable in the way a conventional business is,” he tells me.

That thought offers a particularly revealing way into his work today. The Upper House, Hotel The Mitsui Kyoto, Capella Taipei and Dusit Thani Bangkok belong to different cities, histories and cultural conditions; his furniture and objects enter daily life in a different, more intimate way. Their connection lies less in a recognizable visual formula than in the attention given to how someone enters a room, moves through it, pauses, gathers and remembers.

For this edition of The Inspire Conversations, Fu reflects on what sustains that attention: learning a place without reducing it to symbols, maintaining intimacy as a practice gains international reach, preserving time for decisions that resist shortcuts, and remaining curious enough to keep changing after success.

“I want to transport people to a place that dances between the familiar and the unfamiliar.”

André Fu: A Designer’s Vision by Assouline
Upper House Hong Kong, one of Andre's most recognized projects.
The new Capella Taipei

The arrival at the new Capella Taipei (Photo by Tim Kaye)

The Years Inside a Place

For Fu, understanding a place begins with duration.

Travel, in the conventional sense, has become almost secondary to the way he encounters cities through work. Arriving somewhere briefly can offer impressions; designing there demands something slower. A project can take years, bringing him into repeated contact with local teams, clients and ways of working that gradually alter how he reads a city.

Capella Taipei, he tells me, was six years in the making. Over that period came friendships, conversations and the accumulated experience of returning. “No matter how international someone is, when you spend real time in another place you begin to absorb its pace and behavior.”

That distinction matters in a region frequently flattened into broad cultural categories. Osaka is completely different from Kyoto; Kyoto, in turn, from Tokyo. The closer Fu gets to a place, the less useful the larger labels become. Geography gives way to rhythm, how people communicate, how quickly decisions are made, what feels natural in one city and misplaced in another.

“For me, design becomes a form of cultural immersion.”

The same patience extends to the people behind a project. Many of Fu’s commissions in Asia involve families, inherited sites and histories that existed long before the designer arrived. His role is to understand what the client considers worth carrying forward and eventually find a way to interpret it through his own language.

“It is almost like dating,” Fu says. “You have to build trust before you can really create together.”