As the new Joyce flagship opens, we discover from creative head Gavin So and architect Betty Ng what building legacy entails.

If you were looking for the well-spring of a city’s sense of style, where might you find it? Paris has Place Vendôme, Rue Saint-Honoré and the Boulevard Saint-Germain; London has Soho, the King’s Road and now upcoming areas like Shoreditch; in Tokyo there’s Harajuku and Seoul has Gangnam.

Hong Kong? Adrian Cheng names Victoria Harbour our “Silicon Valley of culture”, while the edgier crowd might opt for the vintage joints of Sham Shui Po. But for an elusive yet fabulous coterie of fashion veterans, the pantheon of style sat at 16-18 Queen’s Road Central, until recently the home of Joyce boutique.

The year 1970 marked the beginning of Joyce Ma’s rule as the city’s style monarch, with her boutique in the heart of Central her seat of power. In the following decades she introduced cutting-edge designers to Hong Kong – Giorgio Armani, Yohji Yamamoto, Dries Van Noten and Rick Owens to name a few. Although not the first outpost for Ma’s fashion genius, the Joyce flagship store in New World Centre illuminated the street with ingenious, mind-haunting windows whose extravagance often competed with the likes of Harrods and Selfridges. In 2009, one memorably featured Alexander McQueen’s Trash Beauty collection, with overdrawn “sex-doll” lips, shattered glass runways…