Designing Spaces That Come Alive: A Conversation with Terrence Quah
What makes a space stay with you?
For Terrence Quah, it can be something quite simple. The way a room makes you feel when you first walk in. Where your eyes go. Whether you feel like sitting down and staying for a while.
His interest in architecture started early.
As a teenager, Terrence travelled to Hong Kong with his family and made his way to the Bank of China Tower, designed by I. M. Pei. He remembers sitting outside the building on his own, simply looking at it.
“There was something incredibly captivating about its bold geometry, precision, and presence.”
He stayed there for quite some time. Something about the building caught his attention and held it. That experience, together with his childhood habit of sketching and observing the things around him, eventually led him towards architecture and design.
Today, as Founder & Director of ARTG Design Group, Terrence works across homes, hospitality, workplaces and healthcare. The projects may be very different, but he keeps coming back to the same question.
How will people experience this place?
A fascination with space
That early fascination has stayed with Terrence. What has changed is the way he looks at design.
When he founded Architology in 2010, he felt there was a gap between interior design and architectural thinking. He saw too many interiors following familiar styles and trends, without enough thought given to the space itself or how people would actually use it.
He wanted to approach interior design with the same rigour and intentionality as architecture, starting with purpose and spatial thinking rather than simply aesthetics.
Over time, his thinking has grown beyond the idea of creating a beautiful interior. He became more interested in the story a space tells and the relationship people develop with it.
“Good design is not just how it looks, but how it is experienced.”
He also makes a clear distinction between art and design. Art can exist purely as expression. Design has to bring creative thinking together with engineering, function and the practical realities of everyday life.
It has to work.
When does a space come alive?
A project can look completely finished on the day the designer walks away. The drawings are done, the materials are in, the lights are working, the furniture is in place.
Then people start using it.
For Terrence, that is when a space really starts to show what it can do.
“For me, a space truly comes alive when it is inhabited.”
He thinks a lot about what happens beyond the obvious functions of a space.
Take a home. It needs to work for the people who live there, of course. But then there are the evenings when friends come over, family gathers around the dining table, someone stays longer than expected, or everyone somehow ends up talking in the kitchen.
These moments are part of the design too.
Terrence pays attention to the little things. Where does your eye naturally go when you enter a room? If you want a drink, do you instinctively know where to find one? If you need to step away for a moment, can you do so without feeling like the whole room is watching?
They may seem like small details, but they can make a surprising difference to how comfortable a place feels.
This is where his idea of hospitality comes in. He applies some of the same thinking to homes and other spaces that you might find in a good hotel or restaurant. There should be a certain ease to it. You walk in, settle down and, after a while, stop thinking about the space itself.
You are simply there.
And when people feel comfortable enough to talk, laugh, linger and come back, the space starts to develop a life of its own.
The emotional language of light
Lighting is another big part of that experience.
Terrence remembers a friend who ran a café telling him what happened whenever she dimmed the lights. People seemed to look better. They started sitting closer together. Conversations became easier.
It was a simple observation, but it stayed with him.
For Terrence, light has a lot to do with attention.
What do you want people to notice? What should sit quietly in the background? How does light fall on someone’s face? What happens to a material or surface when the light changes?
Sometimes, a little less light can make a room feel better. A very bright, stark light can feel uncomfortable. Softer light gives people a little more room to relax.
Colour plays a part too.
Terrence has been thinking about whether different qualities and spectrums of light can create a particular sense of place. Could a restaurant or office use light to evoke something of Tokyo, New York or Hong Kong?
We probably don’t walk into a room and consciously think about the colour spectrum around us. But we pick up on these things.
Light is one of those quiet details that can change the atmosphere without asking for your attention.
When the space has to stay out of the way
At Ki-Shō, these ideas come together in a very direct way.
The restaurant was conceived as a contemporary culinary theatre, with the chef and cuisine at the centre of the experience. From the moment guests arrive, there is a sense that everything has been carefully choreographed.
There is also a particular discipline to the design. The restaurant has no windows, so lighting carries much of the responsibility for creating the atmosphere.
Terrence knew from the beginning where the focus needed to be.
“The true protagonists of Ki-Shō would be the chef and the cuisine. Everything else, including the architecture and lighting, was designed to support that narrative rather than compete with it.”
That thinking comes through in the lighting. Illumination is carefully controlled and directed towards the places where guests should look.
A dish catches the light. The chef’s movements become part of the scene, while the surrounding space falls away.
It gives the restaurant a very different kind of atmosphere. You are aware of the space, but you are also drawn into what is happening at the table.
Light becomes part of the storytelling.
The technology behind the experience
This is where Casambi became part of the conversation.
For Terrence, the lighting system needed to give the team room to work. The atmosphere could not be completely fixed from the beginning. As the restaurant came to life, there would be things to adjust, refine and experiment with.
Terrence describes Casambi as an “invisible conductor”.
It is a phrase that makes sense in the context of Ki-Shō. The lighting can be adjusted across the dining tables, kitchen, decorative elements and other parts of the restaurant, while the system itself stays out of sight.
That flexibility matters.
Terrence sees the ability to make adjustments quickly and intuitively as one of Casambi’s strengths. The team can work with the chef as he discovers the exact atmosphere he wants, rather than treating the original lighting design as the final answer.
A space changes once people start using it. You notice things. Something may work better than expected. Something else may need adjusting.
Good design leaves room for that.
And for the guest, all of this should simply disappear.
They are there for the food, the chef, the people around the table and the experience. The lighting system is doing its work quietly in the background.
Designing for the feeling
There is something quite fitting about bringing the story back to that teenager sitting outside the Bank of China Tower.
He was not thinking about specifications or systems that day. He was simply experiencing a building. Something about its geometry, precision and presence made him stop and look. It made him feel something.
Years later, that same curiosity still seems to sit at the heart of his work.
His approach to design is guided by Space, Spirit, Sense and Surroundings. Together, they shape how he thinks about physical space, the senses, atmosphere and the relationship between people and their surroundings.
But underneath all of it is something harder to define.
Feeling.
“For us, great design is not just seen; it is felt.”
That line perhaps comes closest to explaining his approach.
A wall matters. So does a material, a piece of furniture, the architecture and the light. But the experience comes from how all of these things sit together.
How someone feels when they walk through the door. Where they naturally gather. What catches their attention. Whether they feel comfortable enough to stay a little longer.
These are often the things people remember.
Technology has a part to play here too. For a designer, having control over light means being able to shape the experience as the space evolves, make adjustments and respond to what is actually happening in the room.
At Ki-Shō, Casambi gives Terrence and his team that flexibility while staying quietly in the background.
When everything comes together, you stop noticing the system.
You are simply experiencing the space.
And that is when a space truly comes alive.
