dragon-i

There's a members' room named after a tempo, not a person

Walk past the dance floor at dragon-i and there's a locked door marked 115. It isn't a table number, and it isn't anyone's initials — it's the BPM the owner favours, the tempo he describes as sitting between house music and hip-hop. It's a strange way to name a room. It's also the clearest signal in the building of how dragon-i thinks.

Not 124. Not 128. 115.

Every other late room in Lan Kwai Fong picks a number that flatters a promoter's playlist. dragon-i picked one that describes an actual preference — a small thing, until you notice how rarely nightlife bothers to be specific about anything.

One owner, one Central address, twenty-four years

dragon-i opened in November 2002 on Wyndham Street in Central, and it has run under the same owner ever since. Central's skyline has turned over more than once since then; the club's address hasn't. Ask around the district for the oldest nightclub still trading on its original site, and this is the answer you get.

The 2026 rebuild traded chinoiserie for Wong Kar-wai's palette

For two decades dragon-i ran on phoenix lanterns, a birdcage terrace and dark lacquer — the version of Chinese-luxury nightlife half of Hong Kong copied without crediting. The 2026 reinvention throws that out. London studio Pirajean Lees led the redesign, with Hong Kong firm JJA executing locally and Isometrix on lighting, working in a mood drawn from Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love — pink and acid-green marble, turquoise velvet, silver leather banquettes, glass-brick drinks cabinets, mirrored ceilings and bathroom panels, and a swirl-panelled timber DJ booth built around handcrafted speakers. A stained-glass ceiling was hand-built by a third-generation atelier in Manila; the furniture came from Chinese artisans working to bespoke drawings; textile-clad walls do the acoustic work a nightclub usually leaves to the sound system alone. If you're picturing the old red-lantern room, none of it looks like that any more.

Pirajean Lees sum the finished project up in three words: exposure, unruly, extrasensory. It's the studio's first nightlife commission — their name is built on private members' clubs and boutique hotels, not dance floors — and they describe the brief as building “a cinematic experience, a stage, and a story,” not a room. Isometrix, who handled the lighting install, put the same idea in more technical terms: the aim was a space where the light “feels alive, layering rhythm, warmth, and spectacle into the air” rather than sitting still as a backdrop.

The central bar runs marble-topped; the bathrooms sit under pink light behind stainless-steel cubicles and floor-to-ceiling mirrored panelling — the kind of detail nobody sees in a press render but everybody remembers the next morning.

It reopened as two rooms, not one

The finished project splits into what its designers call two interconnected but distinct experiences: a nightclub, and the intimate members' room where 115 lives. That's not a new idea for dragon-i — restaurant, terrace and club by day and night has always been the format — but the 2026 version draws a harder line between the two. 115 was built inside the club's former restaurant space, anchored by a listening bar built around the owner's own vinyl collection, with a separate games room, back-to-back velvet sofas, green-hued banquettes and outdoor terraces attached — closer to a private flat than a second dance floor.

The guestlist has produced names most Hong Kong rooms only get once

A South China Morning Post Post Magazine feature marking the club's 20th anniversary put David Beckham, Michelle Yeoh and LeBron James among the names that have shown up on dragon-i's guestlist over the years; Beckham came through with the Real Madrid squad on their 2003 Asia tour. The booth talent has matched it: Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre played a live set with DJ Jazzy Jeff on 30 November 2011, at a HK$1,200-cover party marking the club's approaching ninth anniversary, and DJ Snake headlined its 20th-anniversary party on 28 April 2023 at HK$1,500 a ticket. Twenty-four years in, that's less a highlight reel than a running pattern.

None of that history is why dragon-i is worth writing about in 2026 — a decade-old name on a guestlist doesn't fill a Thursday. But it's the pedigree that makes the rebuild a story rather than just another refit.

Finding the right designer took the owner fourteen years

According to Wallpaper*, it took the owner fourteen years to find the designers he trusted with the reinvention before settling on Pirajean Lees. That's an unusual amount of patience for an industry that renovates on a five-year clock, and it only makes sense as a decision if the plan is to hold the address for another two decades.

The sound and the room now answer to one production standard

The rebuild included a new H.A.N.D.HIFI sound system, and the finished interiors were shot for release by photographer Edmon Leong — the kind of production normally reserved for a hotel opening, not a nightclub refit. It's a tell for how seriously the rebuild was treated: not a refresh before a slow season, but a project meant to last as long as the last one did.

dragon-i is back in Lan Kwai Fong's rotation for 2026

Design press had toured the finished interiors by spring 2026 — Dezeen covered the completed renovation on 3 April, Wallpaper* on 28 April — and reviews and photos of the reopened room are current through July 2026. dragon-i operates from The Centrium, 60 Wyndham Street, Central, the building it has occupied since opening in 2002; that's the address on its current listings and this year's reviews. A handful of the design coverage around the relaunch cited LKF Tower, further along Wyndham Street, instead — worth flagging, since it's an easy mix-up between two similarly named buildings on the same block, but the venue's own listings point to The Centrium.

For anyone who's watched a dozen Central rooms open and close in the meantime, the return matters on its own terms: a marquee address didn't just survive, it got taken seriously enough to warrant a name-brand London studio and a fourteen-year search for the right one.