Frank Gehry's Bid for Hong Kong Renters HONG KONG - The Hong Kong skyline is like a celebrity architect roll-call: There are the Bank of China by I.M. Pei, the HSBC building by Norman Foster and the IFC by César Pelli. But in a city whose twin obsessions are property and luxury brand names, there has never been a starchitect- designed residence until now. Last week, Swire Properties unveiled to the public Frank Gehry's Opus Hong Kong - the first major project in Asia for Mr. Gehry, winner of the Pritzker Prize, an annual award for a body of work in architecture. Opus is reaching the market as doubts swirl about Hong Kong property. In interviews, analysts and agents predicted a correction of 10 percent to 15 percent in residential prices this year, while the local media have reported that Hong Kong's new chief executive, who will take office in July, may alter land policy to loosen the grip of major developers, which could drive prices down. Still, analysts put what they call "super-luxury" properties in a category of their own. Indeed, worries about the rest of the market do not seem to have dampened Swire's enthusiasm for what it is describing as potentially the most expensive apartments in the city. The company's marketing blitz began two years ago, when it flew Mr. Gehry, now 83, to Beijing for a retrospective that spotlighted such masterpieces of his as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, before concluding, predictably, with a breathless sales pitch for Opus. In March, Mr. Gehry was in Hong Kong as the final touches were put on the project. A dozen publicists ran around, ushering television crews in and out, while Mr. Gehry looked out a curvy floor-to-ceiling window at an unbroken expanse of green in the ritzy Peak neighborhood - a view affordable only by the city's very rich - drank black coffee and ignored the hubbub around him. "Your quote will have to wait," he said to one of the many journalists, "until I finish this piece of chocolate." Hong Kong property is among the world's most expensive, partly because the government controls land supply, and there is precious little buildable land left. It is a city where high-rises hold as many tiny homes as physically possible, where even ordinary new offerings of property for sale result in huge line-ups and where the police stop overly aggressive real estate agents from harassing passers-by. Against this backdrop of frantic buying and selling, Opus is something of an anomaly: a relatively small super-luxury development that Swire expects to hold onto itself. In terms of design, Opus is tame, compared with Mr. Gehry's more experimental works. It is essentially a glass cylinder with gentle curves, as opposed to the explosion of flaps, sails and ripples seen elsewhere. The twisted support beams are on the exterior, leaving the vast interiors column-free. Seen from above, it is shaped like a flower, with the curved windows and balconies of the "petals" offering views that would be impossible with a more conventional construction. "The level of iconicity depends on the appropriateness of it," Mr. Gehry said of the building's relatively quiet design. This site on the Peak allows for a very dynamic, sculpted piece. The best thing is to be respectful, and not to pre-empt the neighborhood. The project stands out for two reasons. First, the 12-story building has only 12 units: two duplexes with private gardens and pools on the ground floor, and 10 apartments above, each taking up a whole floor and each with its own design. Apartments range from 6,000 to 6,900 square feet, or 560 to 640 square meters - palatial by Hong Kong standards. Also, though the development is hardly modest in price, it is modest in scale because of Opus's particular circumstances. It could be built only because the Swire Group - a conglomerate, controlled by a British family, whose origins date to the 19th century China coast trade - released a plot that had been held privately since the 1940s and had previously been used for a company director's home. That home was razed. Swire had to apply for special government permission and could build only to a certain height. "We couldn't do the horrible chopsticks," Martin Cubbon, Swire Properties" chief executive, said in an interview, referring to the towering spires typical of the cityscape. We recognized that we were doing something special.