Million Dollar Questions with Paring Onions

Is Hong Kong airport better designed than Singapore's? Should the Ferrari Luce exist? And can AI help design a museum? This week, interior designers Alex and Kylie of Paring Onions join Fernando Méndez to talk taste, Hong Kong, and design after "everything has already been designed." They work across Greater China and Australia, and their studio is built on a philosophy of elimination: paring a project back until only its essence is left. We cover quickfire answers on the best design thing in Hong Kong (the airport, the Mid-Levels escalator, the Ding Ding tram). We talk about the people with the best taste they've met, from Achille Castiglioni's studio in Milan to JinR's Green Tea House in Beijing. There's a no-thinking-allowed classification game (love it, just okay, or hideous) with lazy Susans, bamboo scaffolding, Pantone's Cloud Dancer and the Ferrari Luce. Then we go deeper: the Moutai flagship in Sydney, "Miss Westgate" and a Cantonese restaurant in Adelaide that reimagines aristocracy, and a heritage warehouse in Guangzhou where an AI "engineer" from 120 years ago wrote the poem behind the design concept. Stay until the end for the Million Dollar Question bucket. Nobody knows what's inside. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:42 The best design thing in Hong Kong 3:45 The person with the best taste 7:17 A trend that should stay forever 8:27 What the industry secretly hates 9:28 Classification game: love it, just okay or hideous 14:35 The Ferrari Luce debate 17:38 Designing the Moutai flagship in Sydney 20:42 Too much design and the future of design 23:11 Paring back: the philosophy of elimination 24:52 Intuition vs process 27:47 Design with layers: the Parasite lesson 29:05 Miss Westgate: a Cantonese restaurant in Adelaide 33:00 A Guangzhou museum and a 120-year-old AI engineer 37:33 AI and the creative industries 39:27 Pinterest and copy culture 42:01 The horse carriage problem 43:46 Why I'm a pathological optimist 45:26 The Million Dollar Question bucket 46:59 Thailand, transformation and saving Bali 50:01 Questions for the next guest Million Dollar Questions is a Yesca Media podcast about design, art and life, hosted by Fernando Méndez. Subscribe for a new episode every week, and tell us in the comments: Ferrari Luce, love it or hideous? #Design #InteriorDesign #HongKong #Podcast #Architecture #MillionDollarQuestions #YescaMedia