#7: Huishan Low
Goth-themed tables 🪑🦇, @dawn___ng on Instagram, crocheting flowers 💐🧶, Matt Bodnar's Science of Success 🥇, golden pears ⚜️🧈🍐
IT’S HUISHAN’S WORLD, WE’RE JUST EATING ON IT
World-building is second-nature to Huishan Low, a Malaysia-born interior designer. By day, she works at Joyce Wang Studio in Wanchai. But by night she’s the owner of The Tablescape Architects, a business that creates bespoke table designs for lunch and dinner parties. For her, creating a table means creating a world: “a table takes you out of the current place you’re in, and brings you somewhere else,” she says. Combining flowers and tableware with her own graphics and typefaces, she’s created table concepts as unique as “Blue & Orange Lunar Feast,” “Tropical New Years,” and “The Midas Touch.” Recently, Tablescape worked with international cosmetics brand Anastasia Beverly Hills, organizing a sip & paint session to announce a new makeup collection. Huishan’s tables are also eco-friendly. She’s all about using newspapers, recycled materials, watercolor paint — doing more with less because ”you don’t have to have an expensive setup for a good meal!” she says. Here are her recommendations on THE CHOW:
Create a “goth” themed table 🦇🪦🍷
In one of my Tablescape events, I actually asked people eating at the event what concept they wanted next. Someone actually asked for a goth-themed table. That’s something I really want to explore: using the color black… that’s run the rest of the table. And material wise — maybe soft black fabric (it’s all about textures). And will there even be plates? That’s the real question.
Follow Dawn Ng (@dawn___ng) on Instagram ☀️⏰🎨
So Dawn Ng is a Singaporean artist. Recently, she just did a project on how if you were to remove all clocks in the world, how do you tell time? (Apart from the sun). Look at her studio on Instagram, it’s such a dream. Instagram is great to find inspirational people, and Dawn Ng is a really cool one. She just uses such a different lens to view the world.
Crochet flowers 💐🧶
A lot of my projects during my architecture degree involved knitting and textiles, how you can re-imagine with them. Now, I still knit and crochet when I can, and I love knitting flowers.
One of the things I was gonna do with Tablescape was actually use knit flowers instead of real flowers that die off. The making of the flower is just really fun, because you’re knitting in rounds. And when you’re making it, you don’t actually know how the flower will turn out sometimes. You could fuck up at any point — miss a loop or something. And sometimes the flower will come out really ugly, but it’s fun and very therapeutic.
Listen to Science of Success by Matt Bodnar 🧪🏆
I listen to a lot of motivational podcasts. I really like Science of Success. It’s great for me because there's so much pressure that people our age put ourselves in. We’re always in between two mentalities: trying to relax, make memories with friends; or being on the grind, focusing on building your own things. And I feel like confidence fluctuates up and down — the podcast explains these things we’re going through from a very scientific perspective. It’s very grounding and brings you down to earth.
Eat golden pears 🍐🍐
I ate some golden pears recently. I don't know if it's in season anymore because I got during the mooncake festival. But they’re so juicy, so good, and so refreshing… I eat a lot of fruits.
