Cameron Woo is the founder of Cameron Woo Design (CWD) and celebrated as one of the top interior designers in the world. He is also the Chair of the Professional Development Programme for the Interior Design Confederation of Singapore (IDCS).
Having studied Interior Design at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, Cameron Woo worked with outstanding architects, designers and decorators who gave him early grounding and design training. He founded interior design and lifestyle firm CWD in Sydney in 2000 and established an Asian office in Singapore in 2005 to provide his expertise and company’s services to clients throughout the Asia-Pacific.
Woo has been invited to speak at international interior design conferences such as 100% Design, China International Interior Design Cultural Festival, One to One with World Class Designers and Hong Kong International Lighting Fair. He is a panellist on Akzonobel’s Colour Futures and was a guest judge and mentor on the hit international interior design reality television show The Apartment, Rising Stars Edition (Season 5) with 11 million viewers in South East Asia alone.
CWD has been featured in the interior design bible, Andrew Martin Interior Design Review, the Oscars of the interior design world, and has won multiple awards from the International Property Awards, London for World’s Best Interior Design, Asia Pacific’s Best Interior Design and for Singapore. Its clientele include many of the world’s leading property developers such as Kerry Properties, Swire Properties, CapitaLand Residential, Ho Bee Group and Mulpha International. It has also collaborated with some of the world’s largest consumer and prestige brands such as Dulux, Louis Vuitton and Philips Lighting.
Tell us about your guiding approach to design and in managing clients’ expectations as Principal Designer in CWD. I spend a lot of time listening to my clients to interpret and funnel what they really desire. I act as their conduit to realise their desires. My clients sometimes have the best ideas and I learn from them all the time.
Our mandate is always to create desire. Our clients want designs that are irresistible. Especially for high-end residential work, it’s all about creating a lifestyle of comfort and indulgence.
My approach is always to produce the best design notwithstanding the budget. It’s the very opposite of what many people do first; that is, people think about cost and budgets first instead of the design.
People forget that great design is not dependent on budgets but on great ideas and concepts instead.
Thereafter, we work with the client’s budget whilst still ensuring that the overall important design concept is achieved and maintained.
Could you give an example of a recent and successful interior work that you have led from inception to completion?
Our Leedon Park Residence project is typical of what we do at CWD from inception to completion.
The bungalow was large by Singapore standards at 15,000 square feet and included six bedrooms, a bar, home cinema, gym and sauna, pool and outdoor landscaping, three different entertainment areas and a dining room to seat at least 16 people, as well as a mahjong and games room.
The client wanted CWD to design something that was unique for them, truly bespoke and different from some of the other interiors he had seen and in keeping with their lifestyle. One way in which we achieved this was by converting one of the bedrooms into a study, then connecting the study to the master bedroom and walk-in wardrobe to become a super master suite with its own bar servery.
The scope was to design the interior architecture and also to design all the furniture, furnishings and artwork (FF&A) to complete the interiors. We even designed all the handmade ironmongery for all the joinery and casegoods.
CWD also introduced the client to a curated selection of museum quality antiques and exceptional artworks to complement the home.
We really do it all. That’s the expertise of lifestyle, indulgence and comfort our clients are expecting from us at CWD.
What do you think is a major strength of CWD and how have you personally contributed towards its success?
Our strength is the talent and intellectual capacity of our team of architects, interior designers and marketing staff. Design is really cerebral, so we embrace the expert contributions from our team and collaborators.
As a design professional, I am always asking questions. I don’t believe there is anything we can’t design. I am always seeking to not only improve design, but also our standards and processes in the design process. I hope that it is this spirit of being inquisitive that inspires others in our firm to do the same.
Could you give an example of a creative and practical interior concept that you have conceived and delivered?
AkzoNobel’s flagship headquarters in Asia-Pacific is an approximately 100,000-square-foot corporate office fit-out comprising offices, gathering spaces and laboratory.
Our design concept had two aims: the first was to ensure that customers and visitors understood that AkzoNobel—the world’s largest coatings company—is not just a science company, but also a lifestyle leader of brands that affects our daily lives; and, the second was to integrate its different businesses under one roof for the first time physically for the different businesses to feel united and staff to feel energised and inspired at work.
Of course, all of this had to have a sense of place from being in Singapore.
We led the project as lead consultant, including design and project management. The project was delivered on time, on budget and to great client satisfaction.
What foremost interior design principles or considerations come to mind at the onset of your engagement and discussion with clients?
At the initial discussion, as much as the prospective client is deciding upon us as their choice of interior design firm, I am evaluating how much the client understands the process of design and I assess their understanding of the value it brings and how respectful and receptive they are of us as professional interior designers. This is important as it determines how well the potential working relationship could be as every project is always a significant commitment of time, effort and money.
It is because of this significant commitment from our clients, we understand that they are entrusting us with the delivery of a special experience and solution for them. In turn, we dedicate a few years of our professional lives to achieving truly wonderful design solutions for them.
During our engagement, we find that most of our clients enjoy the process of design with us as much as the final result. This is because the serendipity of learning during the design process is not only about discovering what they love, but also what they discover about themselves and educating themselves about the design process along the way.
Interiors create internal spaces that are both visually appealing and practical. Could you highlight a notable work in which you successfully overcame a challenging proposition that competently integrated seemingly divergent improbabilities?
The Summa is a good example of this. It is a premium high-rise residential development of Kerry Properties in Hong Kong aimed at the local affluent market, where CWD was engaged as the lead design consultant for the project.
Kerry Properties’ marketing department in Hong Kong gave a very long list of desired facilities, some of which were not possible to have, simply due to the physical space limitations of the site and gross floor area allowed. Nevertheless, by innovative design we were able to combine a number of facilities and more.
The swimming pool acts as both an indoor and outdoor pool. During the summer months, the decorative screen door panel flips up to allow for the full length of the pool to be swum and enjoyed.
There was initial resistance to the idea of the central garden courtyard as it seemed to take space away from other proposed facilities, but the idea was adopted due to the distinctive benefits of having this as its unique selling point compared to other competitive developments. The central courtyard lawn and garden not only offers visual respite and serenity from its urban environs, but it is also an introspective focus of tranquillity for residents to enjoy the perfumed garden and relax on the lawn. Instead of just focusing on the ‘hardware’ and facilities of this development, we wanted to give residents what they really desired—an amplified sense of space, privacy and exclusivity—in the middle of the city.
Apart from designing all the typical apartments and public spaces, CWD also master-planned the site and conceptualised and developed the architectural façade.
What do you think are the major challenges faced in managing the studio and by the interior industry in Singapore in general?
The biggest internal challenge is finding good designers. The biggest external challenge faced by the interior design industry in Singapore and elsewhere is the misperception of interior design, which is often rendered by contractors free of charge in Asia, having an adverse impact on the value of professional interior design practice, and the disruption of new technologies.
The biggest internal challenge is people. Finding talented, skilled and experienced people who are well rounded in the full spectrum of interior design practice is difficult due to a number of fundamental reasons such as: the varied educational standards in design pedagogy in Singapore and the region; the lack of proper mentorship of interior designers at the beginning of and during their careers; and the gap in knowledge and understanding responsibility between conceptualisation and realisation.
The interior design industry needs to educate the public about what is interior design, who is a professional interior designer, and who is qualified and trained to practise interior design. The value of and contributions made by interior design is not well understood by some other professionals and/or consultants in the built environment industry, so one fundamental starting point is that we need to embark on registering and accrediting qualified and professional interior designers to set, uphold and improve interior design practice standards. By doing this, we can set a high benchmark to help define and delineate our profession from others purporting to offer interior design consultancy when they are really offering contracting services instead.
Improving design standards in Asia is very important to me, which is why I contribute a lot of my personal time to the Interior Design Confederation of Singapore (IDCS) as a volunteer and chairperson of the Professional Industry Development Programme. I hope passionate interior design professionals will come forward to join our association and work together with me to develop and implement industry programmes to raise the bar of interior design in Asia and compete at world-class levels.
Whilst interior designers embrace the upside of technology to enable their creativity to be realised, perceived downsides are that some apps or online platforms are contributing to commoditising the value of design services to unsustainable levels despite the amount of study and work involved to accrue this level of expertise by designers. It is a topic of concern for many of my professional colleagues. During the Singapore Design Week from 3 to 7 March 2017, IDCS had a dialogue session with Houzz to better understand the impact of the technology on our industry and how we address the concerns of interior design practitioners moving forward with Houzz, which I believe was a good first step.
What are the main objectives that you try to meet in every design?
It is to meet and exceed the client brief. I always take the client brief as the minimum because I know our clients expect us to impart expertise in terms of creating a unique language, future proofing the design, and to think of and accommodate things that the client may not have even considered. Our methodology in arriving at an appropriate design solution based on anticipation and consideration is excellent.
What principles are fundamental to your work ethos and culture?
I always remind my team of a maxim that has remained with me from a visiting lecturer during my time studying interior design at university: “As a designer, you are not expected to know about everything, but you are expected to find out about everything you need to know.”
It is this maxim that has allowed me as a designer to be able to design anything and everything from a high-rise residential development to a yacht interior or door pull.
I also believe in creating a specific experience in everything we design, be it a product or space, based on absolute attention to detail that most clients are not even aware of in my design process. For example, the arduous reduction to a specific palette of colours, materials and textures is chosen based on the way natural light enters and falls onto this palette in a space at different times of the day.
What are some of the major accolades you have won and how have they motivated you?
Generally, it is the realisation of a project coming to fruition with a very happy client at the conclusion of the project that motivates me the most.
The awards and accolades that CWD receives are a secondary motivator, but no less important as they serve as recognition from our peers and the industry of our hard work and dedication. Awards and accolades help to build our company’s brand and reputation, especially when we enter new markets.
CWD has won the following interior design awards:
1. International Property Awards – World’s Best Interior Design, Residential Apartment – Nassim Park Residence, 2013–2014
2. International Property Awards – Asia Pacific’s Best Interior Design, Private Residence – Leedon Park Residence, 2015–2016
3. International Property Awards – Singapore’s Best Interior Design, Residential – Multiple winner since 2009 to present
4. Featured in Andrew Martin Interior Design Review Volume 13 and 14 as Top 70 Interior Designers in the World
5. Dulux and Home & Décor Colour Awards 2007 Winner for Modern Classic and Tropical Resort categories
CWD’s accolades:
1. The Apartment – Rising Stars, Season 5 – guest judge and mentor, 2016–2017
2. Akzonobel Colour Futures 2018 – panellist
3. Dulux – brand ambassador
4. Philips Lighting – brand ambassador
5. International Interior Design Cultural Festival 2014, China – keynote speaker
6. 100% Design 2014, Singapore – guest speaker
7. One to One with World Class Designers, Thailand, 2014 – guest of honour
What are your upcoming plans for 2017–2018?
I was a guest judge and mentor on The Apartment television show – Season 5, which was launched in Q2 2017. The Apartment television show is shown around the world with an estimated 9 to 11 million viewers in South East Asia alone and I intend to do more television work.
We look forward to continue working in collaboration with our partners’ consumer and prestige brands such as Dulux and Louis Vuitton. The strength of our brand in terms of design excellence and expertise also helps to connect and reach out to our collaborators’ customers.
We shall be increasing and promoting our furniture and product collections for the first time from the launch of our new website in Q1 2018 at www.cameronwoodesign.com.
Apart from Singapore, we continue to work on projects internationally, such as in Australia and Indonesia. We are designing some residential developments and luxury private houses in Australia. We’ve just finished another private residence in Singapore and hope to be able to photograph and share this with the public very soon.
For the industry and public, in my capacity as Chair of Professional Industry Development of IDCS, we are establishing a registry of certified interior designers to promote standards of interior design practice and professional development and to create and increase awareness of the profession of interior design.
All of which will keep me very busy throughout the year, so I hope to be able to also fit in some time for travel and recreation to reinvigorate and inspire my creativity.