About Design Anthology

Design Anthology

Design Anthology is a Hong Kong-based luxury magazine of interiors, design, art, architecture and travel, launched with its first issue in April 2014. Founded by Australian interior designer Suzy Annetta, it was created to celebrate and showcase Asian design for an international readership — a print magazine born in the digital age, against the advice of the many naysayers its editor recalls, which grew to a reported readership of 80,000 in 30 countries and added dedicated Australian and United Kingdom editions alongside its Asia Pacific original.

A gap in the market, seen from Hong Kong

Suzy Annetta came to Hong Kong in 2005, after several years working in Tokyo, to work for a company; finding the role less fulfilling creatively than she had hoped, she began writing a design blog, Studio Annetta, in her spare time, which later expanded into her own interior design studio. Working as an interior designer, she was frustrated by the lack of good design magazines in the region, online or in print: the available titles were, she felt, either low-brow or highbrow and overly academic, and Asian designers lacked a platform. Planning began in late 2013, with her partner Philip Annetta joining her in what Hong Kong coverage called a leap of faith — selling her home to invest in the magazine — and the first issue appeared in April 2014. The inaugural editorial stated the premise directly: despite the plethora of competition, something was missing; the magazine would combine art, design, interiors, architecture and travel from a Hong Kong base, reflecting a city that was becoming a creative hub and a source of design, with Asian design and designers now highly regarded.

Editorial scope: from macro to micro

Annetta described the magazine's topics as curated to her own reading habits — broader than a conventional interiors title. Its coverage runs, in her phrase, from the macro to the micro: urban planning and the issues of city living alongside architecture, interior design, art and product design. In practice, a Design Anthology issue might travel from a minimal white Japanese interior to a ramshackle brick house in the Vietnamese countryside, profile young Hong Kong design studios, report on design fairs such as Maison&Objet Asia's Singapore debut, and review books and exhibitions. That breadth distinguished it from Hong Kong's older interiors press: where Home Journal served the home-improvement and luxury-property reader, Design Anthology addressed a professional-adjacent creative audience interested in design as culture.

Championing Asian designers

The magazine's founding mission was representation. Annetta argued that incredible talent existed in Hong Kong, but young designers needed more support and a platform — and that real estate costs made Hong Kong a harder place for young creatives than many other Asian cities. The magazine featured emerging local studios such as Studio Adjective and the collective Lim + Lu, documented regional practices from Japan to Vietnam, and in February 2019 hosted its inaugural Design Awards with a judging team of leading creatives including André Fu, Joyce Wang and Shanghai designers Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu. It also planned a book on young Asian designers, announced as the first of many publishing projects. The awards and the book extended the magazine's argument — that Asian design deserved documentation of record — into institutions of its own.

Growth: readership, countries, editions

Within six years, Design Anthology reported a readership of around 80,000 and availability in 30 countries — figures its editor cited in interviews and that Hong Kong media repeated. More unusually for a Hong Kong independent title, it expanded outward: a dedicated edition for the Australian and New Zealand market launched in late 2019, and a UK edition followed, making the Asia Pacific edition one of a small family of regional editions under a Hong Kong-founded brand. Its tenth anniversary arrived with Issue 38 of the Asia Pacific edition in 2024, whose editor's letter recalled being surrounded by naysayers and pessimists in 2014, when starting a new print publication seemed, even then, like insanity — and thanked readers for a wild rollercoaster ride of a decade.

The print proposition

Design Anthology was conceived partly in reaction to screen reading. Annetta's own account says she first researched publishing digitally, but the title launched in print and staked its identity on the physical object: a luxury magazine, carefully produced, sold internationally through newsstands and digital magazine platforms, where its issues are catalogued for subscribers worldwide. Hong Kong coverage framed its survival as a standing rebuttal — a publisher out to prove print is not dead. In a market where Hong Kong's legacy magazines were cutting frequency or closing, a print-first independent reaching its tenth year was legitimately unusual, and the title's own anniversary reflections treat endurance itself as the achievement.

People and base

The magazine is produced by a small team — its editor stresses that, while her name and face are associated with it, each issue is a group effort made with an expanding roster of writers, photographers and illustrators. Annetta, born in Melbourne and trained as an interior designer, lived in Japan for three years before Hong Kong; her co-founding company was Fifth Black Media, and she serves as editor-in-chief. Hong Kong coverage placed the magazine's studio in Wong Chuk Hang, the former industrial district south of Hong Kong Island that became a gallery and creative-industries quarter — a fitting address for a magazine about the city's creative reinvention. The Hong Kong base with an international outlook was deliberate: the founding editorial called the team, like most Hong Kongers, an international, well-travelled bunch, and promised the magazine would reflect it.

Hong Kong in its pages

Although its brief is Asian and international, Design Anthology is a document of Hong Kong design in the 2010s and 2020s: the converted warehouses of Wong Chuk Hang, the tiny apartments reimagined by local studios, the monographs of Hong Kong practices such as AB Concept — whose twenty-fifth anniversary volume the magazine reviewed — and the city's calendar of art and design events. Its interviews return repeatedly to Hong Kong conditions: the cost of space, the density of the city, the meeting of Chinese and international influences. For readers abroad, those Hong Kong stories were the magazine's home dispatch; for local readers, its international coverage placed their city's designers in company they rarely kept in print.

Position among Hong Kong design media

Hong Kong design publishing divides, roughly, into service interiors magazines for homeowners, trade titles, and the design coverage of luxury lifestyle groups. Design Anthology carved a different position: independent, English-language, internationally distributed, and editorially led by a practising designer's taste. It competed less with local rivals than with the international design press, while offering what that press could not — sustained, knowledgeable attention to Asia's own designers. Its survival and expansion, when set against the contraction of Hong Kong magazine publishing in the same decade, made it a reference case in regional media coverage of independent publishing.

Beyond the magazine

The brand's extensions — design awards, planned books, regional editions — follow the pattern of modern magazine brands that must be communities and institutions, not only periodicals. The inaugural Design Awards in 2019, judged by some of Asia's best-known designers, positioned the magazine as a convener of the regional design world it covered. Its editor's public roles in interviews and design events similarly carried the title's voice beyond its pages. Each extension reinforced the founding claim that Asian design was a field with its own excellence, worthy of prizes, monographs and a magazine of record.

Significance

Design Anthology's significance in this directory is as the Hong Kong independent magazine of the digital era that worked. Launched in April 2014 from a designer's frustration, planned in late 2013 and financed as a personal leap of faith, it reached a reported 80,000 readers in 30 countries, spawned Australian and UK editions, created design awards, and marked ten years in print in 2024. It also documents a shift in Asian design itself: from source material for Western magazines to a subject with its own Hong Kong-published chronicler. That a Melbourne-born, Tokyo-seasoned designer founded it in Hong Kong is not incidental — it is the kind of crossroads story the magazine itself likes to tell.