Lanson Place Causeway Bay

After two months travelling through China with Mrs Smith, arriving in Hong Kong feels like a sudden return to London, albeit a version of London that has been left for a while in a toasted-sandwich machine — squished, meltingly hot, and with the best bits, the crispy oozy bits, mostly located at the edges. The buildings are so tall, the streets so narrow, trams and buses feel just like London but also squished-up taller, narrower. It’s 37°C with high humidity. The air sticks, the dripping of air-conditioning units the closest there is to rain.

In this heat, Lanson Place Causeway Bay is like a little oasis of cool and calm. The brick-walled foyer is big, with soft sofas and stacks of books. The restaurant, Salon Lanson, is also airy and comfortable, a gentle, chilled wash of aqua and oatmeal, with plump banquettes and plenty of gold accents (gold-leaf-patterned cushions, gold swallows painted across the ceiling, and leaf-shaped flashes of gold across the white mosaic bar).

Perched atop this handsome mosaic bar at breakfast is a bottle of prosecco in an ice bucket. 'For toasting!' laughs our server, who seems very keen for us to have something to toast. It’s a little early for us, however, and, besides, I have to focus on the important things in life: namely, the daintiest little hash browns I ever did see (small, round and perfectly crisp). I confess that, alongside a mound of scrambled egg, my consumption of these hash browns (how many? Who’s counting?) is anything but dainty. The breakfast spread is excellent: yoghurts and fruit, bircher muesli, cold cuts, pastries, eggs cooked to order, and various regional specialities like dim sum and congee.

Twenty floors up, our Studio Residence King suite has wide windows on two sides, with views south towards lush green mountains and east over the sports pitches of Victoria Park. Mrs Smith is a little put out not to have a view of the sea, but at night, with the adjacent skyscrapers and highways lit up in bright white, amber and jade green, I think it’s pretty fab.

Decor in the suite itself is fairly plain: pale creams with the occasional metallic accent. There’s a marble-topped coffee table in front of a dinky little sofa and four Jean Cocteau portrait prints along one wall. There’s a kitchenette and a little breakfast table. To me it feels a bit bijou, but Mrs Smith (a seasoned visitor here; it’s my first time) assures me that, for Hong Kong, this is positively palatial. And certainly, with the air-con keeping things crisp and cool inside — so much so that great swathes of condensation spread across the outside of the windows — our suite feels like an utterly essential little retreat above the sticky heat of the city below.

The area around the hotel, Causeway Bay, is a characteristic mix of high-end boutiques and street vendors, office workers and bustling markets. For the classic Hong Kong diner experience, we were recommended the nearby Fu Wah Cafe, the extremely jazzy interior of which (banquettes in orange and turquoise, curves of matt gold throughout) was absolutely packed with lunchtime customers. This is the place to go for Hong Kong classics: pineapple buns (fat and soft with a crispy sugar crust), bewilderingly sweet milk tea and custard tarts.

In the past few years, many of the world’s big-hitting commercial art operations have opened galleries in Hong Kong. Hauser & Wirth, Gagosian and David Zwirner are all clustered in the Central district, a short cab ride west from Lanson Place Causeway Bay. Come nightfall, don’t miss the expertly mixed cocktails at Penicillin. Culture lovers should also make sure to visit M+, a massive contemporary art museum that opened in 2021 in an otherwise unprepossessing development in West Kowloon.

Much nearer and much more idiosyncratic is PHD Group, an independent gallery housed in a former members' club on the top floor of a 1970s office block. The space is a beautiful combination of industrial and domestic, and it’s definitely worth booking an appointment to see its exhibitions. Gallery co-director, Ysabelle Cheung, is also a writer and her debut short-story collection, Patchwork Dolls, is a brilliantly lingering collage of bodily discomforts, exploitation and imaginings set against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure, hyper-consumerism and dystopian crises, which are maybe never that far from reality. It feels very Hong Kong.

To escape the heat one day, I retreat after an another excellent breakfast at Lanson Place to South Beach, as recommended by the other PHD Group co-director, Willem Molesworth, who Mrs Smith and I met by chance at a gallery opening in Beijing. The beach is a bus ride and short (albeit very sweaty) walk along the coast away. It’s a pretty idyllic spot. I spend half the day lying on the sand reading Patchwork Dolls and the other half floating about in the sea watching herons and kites and things. That is, until the braying from the party yachts become a little much, and I retreat contentedly to the air-conditioned comfort of our dinky little palace, 20 floors up at Lanson Place Causeway Bay.