Dear friends,

I wish to share with you a story of one of our clients, Jeffrey Kwok and his father, who are both philanthropists from Hong Kong.

Jeffrey's father ran a chain of "Mahjong Schools"(a.k.a. Mahjong parlors) in Hong Kong and his flagship outlet is situated on the ground floor of a sixty years old building called the Alhambra Building (平安大樓) in Kowloon, Yau Ma Tei, near Temple Street. The Kwok’s family also owns other units within the same building.

For those of you who are not familiar with Hong Kong, Temple Street was, and still is, one of the cities red-light districts mainly visited by aged local men and currently, Temple Street is now dazzling with tourism.

Running Mahjong school is a tough and hardening business, because they are essential bookmakers.

Jeffrey is in the advertising industry and he was the founder of a local advertising company, PMM Media, which promotes social enterprises. Perhaps it was through his media network that Jeffrey had learned the difficulties that Gingko House (銀杏館) was facing. Gingko House is an esteemed local social enterprise which operates restaurants that provide employments for retired elderly. In 2016, The Gingko lost their lease of their main restaurant and they were desperate to find a new space. Hong Kong is rated as one of the most expensive city to live in the world and it has the highest real-estate prices, opening a new restaurant in Hong Kong is difficult.

Jeffrey persuaded his father to lease out one of their units within the Alhambra Building for Gingko House, which has a net floor area of 300 square meters. Not only that Mr. Kwok senior agreed, he had only asked for one-eight of the market rate as the rent, hoping that the low rent would aid Gingko’s business and facilitate their social causes.

Gingko had chosen us for the work not only because of our past successful restaurant design cases, but perhaps for our philosophy and humanistic approach towards architecture.

The project unexpectedly took much longer than normal projects because of lengthy government funding validation process. Gingko House is a non-government organization and their spending were monitored and needed justifications. In Hong Kong, restaurants with such size would take three to five months to complete, Gingko House took two years.

Perhaps Jeffrey’s altruism and compassion are the best gifts for his father.