Edwin Chuang Ka-fung should know - at 30, he is already the deputy managing director of two listed companies: Chuang's Consortium International and Chuang's China Investments.
"Yes, I got promoted [in September] by my father," he says. "It feels great. That means I have to work harder. But there are other good things happening. My sister got married. I actually got promoted right after her wedding."
However, just consider the shoes he has to fill. His grandfather is the late Chuang Chung-wen, who started by selling stainless steel tableware and manufacturing textiles, and eventually founded the property development arm of the family business in the 1970s.
Edwin's father, Alan Chuang Shaw- swee, expanded the family firm into the mainland, Taiwan, Mongolia and Southeast Asia. The senior Chuang, now chairman of both listed companies, still oversees the business empire, although he is semi-retired.
Edwin is one of the four siblings in the third generation to pick up the baton. He was asked by his father to join the family business in 2012 after spending seven years in New York.
An architect by training, Chuang had founded his own architectural and interior design consultancy - EDesign Studio - after leaving the Parsons School of Design in New York. He still holds shares in the successful firm, but has scaled back most of his duties there.
"I was born into a Fujian family. My father and g
Two years ago, he was given a difficult assignment: finding a use for an office building the group owns in Hung Hom. He had the idea of converting it into a hotel, since at that time, the company had three other hospitality project sites in Cebu, Taipei and Xiamen.
"The numbers showed that we could get a higher profit if we turned [the Hung Hom site] into a hotel. We initially tried to do a three-star hotel as the cost would be lower. My father liked the idea, but I thought of what's best for the group. I saw the potential for scalability. We could make something nicer."
So he presented to his father a strong case for building a four-star boutique hotel. "He believed me, but he thought the idea was risky," Chuang says. "However, I gave him this feeling that he could trust me and believe in my ideas."
He said getting building approval and plans done for the Hung Hom site were easy. The most difficult task was deciding which direction to go. He started with a brand name - SAV - standing for style, attitude and vision.
He also thought of using color therapy for the interiors. Each floor of the 25-story building and each of the 388 rooms have different colors to create different moods. "I am a painter before I am an architect. I like using colors," he says.
"I toyed with the color concept, and it made sense in terms of branding. We can mix colors with events and food."
He is also blending his newly-found scuba diving hobby into the 12-hectare site in Cebu where an international diving center, as well as a 1.6-kilometer-long underwater coral and sculpture garden are now being built. "I got influenced by my brother Albert and my father, who are both scuba divers. My father is 65. He is an experienced scuba diver and has already dived more than 200 times. My family enjoys diving together," Chuang says.
The founder and chief executive of SAV Hospitality - which now owns a serviced apartment in Taipei, the diving resort in Cebu, a hotel in Hong Kong and a spa resort in Xiamen - has big plans. "When the Xiamen project completes building, we will have 100 rooms and 30 villas. The architecture will have a modern Bali style, surrounded by a nice landscape," he says.
"The interior is now almost 70 percent completed. We will soon have the management to go there and train the staff, so hopefully, it can open before the Chinese New Year." Serviced office taipei
來源:The Standard