In spring in Japan, you will find strangers gathered around a single cherry tree, heads tilted up, holding still. They stay like that for twenty minutes at a stretch, quiet except for the occasional snap of a camera. The first time Winnie Tam saw it, she stopped too. A crowd of people, agreeing without a word that a branch of pink blossom was worth the afternoon. She had never watched the natural world command that kind of public respect, and it changed what she thought a designer was for.
Tam designs physical spaces, though she squirms at the job title that comes with it. “I studied a long time to earn the title of architect,” she says, “but I don’t feel that architecture encompasses all that I do.” What she makes are sanctuaries for city people: rooms you can retreat into when the fast, over-consumptive world outside becomes too much. Her studio is called Fourteen a.m., after an hour that appears on no clock. “It’s an impossible moment,” she says. “Like living in a city and finding isolation, or undergoing a construction project and not being stressed. These things feel impossible, but I want to make them possible.”
Fourteen a.m. is the hour that keeps slipping away. Winnie Tam builds toward it on purpose.
Nature is the tool
Ask Winnie what her most important design tool is and the answer is nature, mostly for what it does to her head. “Normally we’re too stressed and distracted,” she says, “but in nature we are able to zone out and hear our own minds.” It is also where she shops for ideas. “When I take the time to look at a tiny little leaf or lichen or rock formation, I am in awe of the beauty, shape, texture, and function. I always want my designs to remind us of some form of nature.”
The irony is not lost on her that she has only ever lived in enormous cities. Hong Kong, where she grew up. London, where she studied. Tokyo, for a while. “If I were to move to the country,” she half-jokes, “I’m not sure I’d know how to live there.” Growing up in a city, she says, breeds a head-down mentality. “You feel stressed all the time and you walk by so many beautiful moments because you don’t know how to appreciate things.”
Japan rearranged that. “Too often we look at things, but we fail to really see them. In Japan, every single season is appreciated. Every single day, there is something to celebrate, even the smallest things.” She credits the country with her respect for slow, deliberate craft, the kind where every detail has a reason. “When you care for something it becomes meaningful. When you pay more attention, you gain a lot more enjoyment.” She brought the habit home. A weed flowering out of a drain is enough to stop her on the street.
The corporate years, and the gap in them
None of this fit the start of her career, which ran on high rises and corporate contracts. She worked on large projects like the university buildings at Paddington Square, off Euston Road, the kind of line that reads as success on an early CV. It left her cold. “Whilst I enjoyed my work, it didn’t satisfy me. I had excellent opportunities, but I didn’t feel like I was making an impact, or that I could bring my own message.”
Then the two stresses met in her mind. The strain of big construction and the strain of the city were, she realized, the same problem wearing two coats. Fourteen a.m. was the answer she built to escape both. She did not have it all figured out at the start, and she has made her peace with that. “Before you launch a business, you convince yourself you have to have a certain amount in place. It’s not the case. As with construction, we tend to go about building a business in a very rigid way, but that is where the stress comes from.”
What her own renovation taught her
In 2020 she gutted and rebuilt her own home. She meant it as a proof of concept for the studio. Covid delayed the build, the studio arrived before the house did, and somewhere in the middle she learned the lesson that now shapes every brief she takes.
She had played all three roles at once. “In that job, I was the client, the designer, and the project manager. Access to all those mentalities incentivized me to make the process less stressful. I understood the ins and outs of how the design was progressing, I had complete control over its development, and yet I still felt stressed. You can only imagine how stressed an uninformed client must be.” So now she keeps her clients as close to the work as she can bear to.
Closeness, for Tam, runs well past fabric swatches and paint chips. She is building a personal-development track into her projects, run with a mindfulness expert, on the theory that a serene home is wasted on a frantic mind. “An architectural project will take a minimum of one year. I’m given that one-year window to gift my clients educational material and expose them to a more mindful way of living. The zen space they end up with should really be a reflection of the state of mind they cultivated along the way.”
Her own house is the argument for all of it. A transformed Edwardian maisonette, dainty and daring at once, where nothing sits in a room without a reason to be there. Raw timber holds the structure. Clay plaster covers the walls. Handmade terracotta lines the bathroom floor. No plastic anywhere. “It is manmade, but it is all reminiscent of nature. There are lots of imperfections, because in nature nothing is symmetrical or identical, and that imperfection is what makes it perfect.” Her eye turns out to be contagious. For days after we talk, I catch myself admiring cracks in the pavement, a tree grown crabwise, a pair of shoes worn soft with age.
A method named after farming
Tam gives the stages of her process the language of working the land, because the usual project vocabulary felt too cold to her. First comes the Winnowing: a one-hour, face-to-face meeting to sort the useful material of a client’s life from the chaff, morning to night, what they actually do all day. Then the Nursery, where the first idea is kept alive and allowed to grow. Then Pruning, the tweaking and tailoring. Then the build, and after it, AfterCare.
She chose the words on purpose. “I never say, this is what we decided at the beginning and that’s how we have to move forward. I allow the design a life of its own rather than forcing a manmade outcome. It’s about a home being grown in an organic process.”
She is the first to admit it is not for everyone. “If you’re not into this way of thinking, you might think that I’m crazy.” When a client’s outlook sits too far from her own, she would rather hand them to a designer who fits than force it. “As designers, we design lifestyles, and it’s important that our visions for that align.” Even with the clients who stay, she keeps her own taste on a leash. “You can’t be possessive about a design being yours. Your client is the one who lives there, and they should want to live there.”
What a sanctuary actually is
By the end of a pot of peppermint tea, Tam has talked her way to a definition of her signature that has nothing to do with a color or a material. It is the ethos underneath: gratitude, attention, the repair she believes nature can do on a tired mind. Interior design is only her current medium for it. A sanctuary, she points out, does not have to be a home at all. It can be a coffee shop, an office, a hotel. It can be a dress, a book, a piece of art. “It’s the feeling of a space rather than its typology.”
She ends where she is most herself, greedy to design all of it. “Creativity does not have a finishing line. When we look at existing beautiful things, we gain a certain gratitude from them. We create because we want to gift the gratitude back.”
Winnie has since rebranded Fourteen a.m. as 28am, at @28am.studio.
