Cheng Design Wins International Interior Design Association Honor Award for Commercial Interior
February 19, 2007, Berkeley, CA — Cheng Design, led by award-winning and internationally recognized designer Fu-Tung Cheng, has been named one of twelve Honor Award winners by the Northern California Chapter of the International Interior Design Association (IIDA-NC) for the commercial interior design of Teance tea bar.
Teance, located in Berkeley’s upscale Fourth Street shopping district, is a skylit, transcendent environment of sustainable bamboo cabinetry, raked plaster walls and hand-made glazed porcelain tiles. Grounding this unique space is a 10-ft circular concrete tea-sampling bar. Cast in a single pour and embedded with semi-precious gemstones and fossils, this signature feature invites visitors to sit and sip, enjoying the subtleties of the fine tea, the surface of the bar and the garden-like setting.
Entering the doors of recycled glass and gazing down into the small fish pond set into the foyer floor, visitors are welcomed into a setting unto itself. Water drips down from high overhead into a moss-covered stone vessel set into the center of the pond, playing percussion to the soft music playing in the background. Rows and rows of exotic tea and tea wares line the walls, sitting on floating bamboo shelves. Concentric circles — in walls, floor and countertop surfaces — invite visitors into the space and reinforce the sense of serenity and calm, befitting the first tea-tasting bar of its kind.
The Honor Awards recognize and award outstanding interior design, as well as the successful collaboration between design and client, and encourage new ideas and techniques in the design and furnishing of interior spaces. Each entry is judged by a panel of design professionals, educators and clients for suitability to the project challenge, success of the solution from the client’s perspective, originality of the design solution and the successful integration of interior forms, finishes and furnishings.
About Fu-Tung Cheng
Fu-Tung Cheng heads the award-winning firms of Cheng Design and Cheng Design Products in Berkeley, California. A native of Los Angeles, Fu-Tung graduated from UC Berkeley with a Fine Arts degree and has since planted roots in the Bay Area. His home has served as a creative “laboratory and showroom,” where years of design experiments are the base for the firms’ hands-on approach to creative building and Fu-Tung’s bestselling book, Concrete Countertops: Design, Forms, and Finishes for the New Kitchen and Bath(Taunton Press). His second book, Concrete at Home, offers a creative look at concrete applications in the home including fireplaces, water features, floors, walls and more.
Willing to go anywhere for good design, Cheng Design’s projects are located coast to coast, including Puerto Rico and Hawaii. The firm’s signature style has appeared in Metropolitan Home, Architectural Digest, House Beautiful, Elle Décor, Sunset and Dwell, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, and Chicago Tribune.
Cheng Design has been honored with numerous awards, including most recently:
- 2006, National Kitchen and Bath Association (NKBA) Hall of Fame induction
- 2006, California Home + Design (CH+D) Awards, Commercial Architecture, First Place, Celadon Teahouse
- 2005, Voted by the readership “one of the Top 50 most influential figures in the kitchen and bath industry over the past 50 years,” Kitchen and Bath Business (KBB)
- 2005, “Special Focus Award: Kitchen” Meteor Vineyard Kitchen, Builder’s Choice Design & Planning Awards, Building Magazine
- 2005, “ADEX Award: Platinum Award” Shade Hood, Cheng Design by Zephyr, Design Journal Magazine
For more information on Cheng Design or Cheng Design by Zephyr, please call
(510) 849-3272 or visit www.chengdesign.com