A well-painted vase with the 13th century Chinese river side scenery, or a table in the English royal style-These are just a few of the furniture designs that depict high culture feel and a touch of taste.

Being a little far away from the heart of Europe or the old China in space and time, you may still find a perfect replica of antique furniture that meets your want for a piece of fine living art. Foochow Lacquer Ware & Furniture Ltd., a Hong Kong-based furniture and living room ware designer, perfects the art of antique-style replication. Its elegant fixtures and practical living room wares all serve as objects of artistic appreciation.

First started in 1970 as a provider of quality hand-crafted and hand-painted furniture, Foochow Lacquer Ware has been specialised in making historic European and old Chinese dynastic style furniture and living room wares, such as antique clocks, vases or cabinets. Headquartered in Hong Kong with the production base in Guangdong, China, Foochow Lacquer Ware is now exporting its classic-style furniture and living room wares to more than 50 countries. The company’s production is run by a 150-member well trained team, including designers, craftsmen, artisans and quality control engineers.

Due to the exceptional unique nature of its furniture items, as different from those mass-produced merchandises, like toys or general kitchen wares, Foochow Lacquer Ware relies mainly on labour-intensive craftworks, fabricating and finishing to turn out its products. Emily Ho, Foochow Lacquer Ware’s manager, admits that it does take a much longer production lead-time for all the company’s end products. “Since we are not mass-producing our furniture, we need to get precise orders from our clients. We generally need 45-60 days to complete an order.”

“As such, we always workon small quantity but high-value orders. Our products are different from the mass-produced, simplicity style items like what you see in those furniture retail chains. Small individual furniture retailers form an important part of our client base.”

To work out exceptional styles and attractive designs, Foochow’s design team will draw their inspiration from every possible source, including magazines, web resources, and even by visiting museums and exhibitions.

She added, “And of course, we will never take the short-cut and just copy everything we see. Regardless of the issues of copyright and ownership, it’s nonsense to build up our own styles by simply doing copy-and-paste of some others’ designs.”

After years of evolution, according to Emily Ho, Foochow Lacquer Ware has found its best approach to blend classical styles into modern living setting. She pointed out that customers from different cultures do have their own interpretations of what makes a fine piece of furniture “classical”.

“We have a good share of our buyers coming from the Middle East countries, like Saudi Arabia. They tend to favour furniture in brightly-lit, gold-packed designs and coming with similarly-decorated smaller items such as vases and clocks. A big contrary to them are buyers from western markets. American or European buyers tend to source furniture with simpler designs, clear-cut curves and structures. They don’t like too much decorations or patterns on the surface. Their favourites are usually Italian and European style.”

Foochow Lacquer Ware specialises in both classical western and oriental designs. Emily Ho said what the clients see now are actually the latest generation of products from Foochow Lacquer Ware. In the beginning, Foochow Lacquer Ware worked mainly on furniture of antique Chinese style.

“Back then, our products were mostly furniture items in old Chinese style and designs, like those with inscriptions of traditional Chinese patterns. All of our products were hand-crafted and hand-painted just like now. Only in recent years have we gradually taken on designing and manufacturing western-style items.”

Emily Ho continued to tell about Foochow’s core competency-“reinventing”: turning out classical style furniture with new techniques and new materials. “We seldom originate purely own designs. Instead, we look at the current trend before putting classical elements and features into our cabinets, drawers and mirror sets. For example, we are now trying out new glass decoration sets. By combining glass with new materials and new patterns, we can turn out brand-new designs that fit any home.”

Emily Ho emphasised that Foochow’s focus is not on producing “antiques”, but rather making furniture with a classical touch. Foochow does not hesitate to adopt modern materials for making their pieces. “For example, we use MDF (Medium Density Fiberboard) in forming the critical components in a piece of furniture, such as drawers in the cabinets. For the vases, we use porcelain as our material of choice,” she added.

After 30 years of development, Foochow now maintains a core design team of 4-5 professional designers who stations both in Hong Kong and China. They are responsible for ideas origination and design formulation. She explained, “These designers will “dream up” the ideas and designs. Some fancy designs or ideas may be hard or even impossible to be refined into real products. It is very important for us to take care of both the design and the practical aspect of any product.”

Once the product designs are finalised, the task will then be transferred to the handcrafter team who will turn the design concepts into realities. “Our whole design-handcrafting team totals 10-15 people. It usually takes 1-2 months to turn an idea into a workable model,” Emily Ho elaborated.

On the market side, Emily Ho says that even though there are many new demands in different markets, people nowadays tend to look for more simplified and clear-cut designs to blend into the modern living room setting.

Other than changing customer tastes, Foochow has to face increasingly stiff competition.

“Yes, we do face a lot of competition in recent years, especially those from the mainland China. It is imperative for us to enhance ourselves and face it,” Emily Ho said. “What we can do is to put more time into the perfection of our handcrafting standards. Quality, after all, is most important.”

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