Pierre Chen, chair of Yageo: ‘If I still feel excited a week later, then I’ll buy it’

It took Pierre Chen almost four years to finish everything. After he had bought the apartment in November 2016, he discussed his vision with his interior designers, pored over floor plans, picked materials, inspected intermediate stages of work. Then came the moment to choose where to hang some of the artworks he owns. When he moved in late 2020, he had spent one-tenth of his entire working life on creating his new home.

Perfectionism comes with the job for the Taiwanese entrepreneur. Now 67, Chen has for the past 43 years been making and selling some of the tiny components that ensure electronic devices function properly, a business that requires extreme precision.

He is obviously good at it: Yageo, the company founded by his brother that he has chaired since 1989, is the world’s largest producer of resistors, which regulate the flow of electricity in integrated circuits, and Chen himself is now Taiwan’s eighth-richest man.

At home, the obsession with detail that helped him achieve this is on full display. Chen is showing me around his downtown Taipei apartment, designed by Studio Liaigre, the team of the late French interior designer and architect Christian Liaigre who have outfitted his homes for many years.

After careful consideration, Chen directs me to a white leather fauteuil in a veranda off the main living area. On the white coffee table sits a beautiful flat box with flower decor containing a Dior kite in the shape of a butterfly. He carefully adjusts its angle by about a centimetre as he sits down opposite me.

Chen owns many homes, but this one is special: he chose it to accommodate a change in lifestyle and as the heart of a cluster of city apartments for his family.

More than 30 years ago, he and his first wife moved to a villa on Yangmingshan, the volcanic massif that separates the Taipei basin from the north coast, to give their son and twin daughters, born within 12 months of each other, space to run and play. Chen still feels very much at home there with his pool, hiking trails and hot springs at his fingertips.

But when his grown-up children returned to Taiwan after studying in the US, they made clear they’d rather live in the city. So he started looking for a downtown building which could accommodate homes for them as well as himself.

“The kids want to be independent in everything, but they still won’t be independent financially,” he says. He spent several years looking at dozens of buildings until he saw this one: a 14-storey residential tower built by the owner of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel across the street, who also happens to be his friend.

The building gets its structural support from steel pillars on each outside edge of its octagonal shape, creating a space without columns or supporting walls. “It is freer inside,” says Chen. “For an interior designer, it’s challenging because they have to create from zero.”

The result is spectacular. A walkway with columns and arches clad in a warm shade of oak runs around the elevator at the centre of the 1,186 sq m space, like a modern, playful version of a peristyle in a European monastery. That is no coincidence: “I love the Mediterranean. They have a lot of arches there, so this space had designed that concept into it,” Chen says. “I prefer it a bit more transparent, I don’t like a lot of separated rooms. Arches make you feel like there is a separated space, but you can move through it.”  

The walkway forms a more private area with bedrooms, bathrooms and a massage room branching off it. Ceiling spotlights highlight some of the artworks Chen has acquired over the years. There is Picasso’s “The Sailor” looking at us as we walk down a long corridor. A Rodin sculpture in another corner. Thomas Struth’s “Milan Cathedral” on the wall of the walkway, so close that I could touch it. Black-and-white photographs of a snowy forest by Ugo Rondinone hang over a marble tub.

The space Chen is clearly most attached to is his study, a smaller room with wooden bookcases covering the walls where at night, the off-white curtains drawn, he will sit at a desk made from African mahogany and study art and jewellery catalogues. “When I like something I see, I will leave it on the desk, and if I still feel excited about it a week later, I will buy it,” he says.

On the east and west sides of the building, this enclosed area leaves two huge, irregularly shaped open living spaces flooded with natural light. As Chen dislikes high-rises, he has chosen the third floor. “I like looking out on the treetops,” he says, pointing to the sea of green outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, trees he had planted in the park next door.

One of the two open spaces is dominated by Wolfgang Tillmans’ “Love (Hands in Hair)”, a photograph of a woman’s face with her eyes closed in apparent enjoyment as a man buries his hands in her hair.

“People ask, why do you only put that photograph in this large a space? Because it touches me,” says Chen. “Rather than hanging your most famous Picasso in a place where everyone sees it the moment they come in and go ‘oh, ah’, I think about art like this: Art is a part of my life. I don’t necessarily choose a work of art depending on its value but depending on how I live with it and interact with it in this space.” He bought the Tillmans picture because it reminded him of a photo a friend took of his girlfriend.

This area was conceived for entertaining business partners and friends. A lot of Yageo’s acquisitions — Chen has been buying companies at the same brisk pace as artworks — were negotiated at the long dining table next to the open kitchen, says an aide. Chen treats them to food he cooks himself and wine — his other great passion. He prefers natural flavours and dishes made from the freshest fish, meat and vegetables he can find in the local markets — a preference he explains with his simple upbringing in his family’s seaside home in southern Taiwan, where fresh fish was the cheapest staple.

If you sell all your assets here and move abroad, will you be happier? No. You would be running to a place where you are not happy and worrying about something that may never happen

For friends, he likes to cook beef noodle soup. He pairs it with champagne. “To match the spice, you can’t pair it with too soft a wine!” he says with a laugh. The cellar built into a wall next to the open kitchen contains enough wine to drink for 10 years, he adds. Some of his wine collection will go on sale with Sotheby’s this summer.

He treats his wine as seriously as he does everything else at home. “What the wine, especially these old vintages, fears most is if you transport them to Tainan, Hong Kong, China. It’s like a human being, after you grow old, you can’t take it any more to travel everyday,” he says. “So that’s why, once I buy it ex-domaine or from the château, I’ll put it in my place and not touch it again. The quality is different from those wines that are bought and sold all the time.”

The second big open space on the other side of the building is a private area. It centres on a family room that Chen decorated with art and accessories around horses and surfing. “It should have to do with the family’s activities, and we all ride and we like to surf,” he says. “It is good to share the interest in a sport so you have something to discuss.”

The idea was that his family would meet here, with his three grown children living in their own homes in the same building. “This allows us to take better care of each other — I am a bit more traditional that way,” he says. To prepare for that, he bought nine of the building’s 14 floors, the others being snapped up by Johnson Chiang, former chair of Elitegroup, another big Taiwan technology company.

So far, things have not worked according to plan. Many of the other apartments remain empty as his offspring still live on their own — one daughter is an Olympic rider in Germany, and the other a surfer in Australia.

But Chen has got unexpected company. He now lives with his youngest child, a four-year-old daughter whose existence was revealed only when paparazzi spotted her on the arm of her mother outside the building two years ago. In one of the bathrooms, I see a little pink plastic stepladder that would help a toddler reach the washbasin, and a small plastic tub more suitable to a young child than the deep marble baths.

Chen let his daughter choose a work of art from his collection for her bedroom. She picked Picasso’s 1970 drawing “Pierrot et Arlequin”. “They probably seemed familiar to her from the stories she listens to every day about witches and so on,” he says with a laugh.

There is no other sign of a child in the apartment. But she has changed Chen’s life: While he used to stay in the city during the week and spend the weekends on the mountain, he has now turned that around to drop her off and pick her up at pre-school close to his mountain villa during the week, and they stay downtown on weekends. He has transformed one of the empty apartments upstairs into an indoor playground for her, complete with a slide, a swing and play trains.

Chen believes that one day, his other children will move in, too. “Maybe when they have their own family and children, they will return to family values,” he says. “But I’m not in a hurry, I’m building out unit by unit.”

Investing so much in property in Taiwan — on top of keeping his art and wine collections here — seems a big commitment to a place the world has come to see as dangerous given ever more frequent threats from China. I question if he doesn’t fear losing everything.

“Saying that you haven’t thought about that would be lying,” Chen says. “But if you sell all your assets here and move abroad, will you be happier? No. You would be running to a place where you are not happy and worrying about something that may never happen.”

He asks me to think about how people in Israel and Palestine live with the risk of war, and how Americans have to worry about gun violence. “This is the country I deeply love, the place I care about most, where I grew up,” he says. He adds that Taiwan should do everything to ensure China will never attack. “If that day comes, we will face it.”

My favourite thing

Chen resists my attempts to have him name a favourite object in his home. In the end, he starts talking about something that’s not really his but points to a favourite person: the play tent in his daughter’s room. It is modelled on a Native American tepee, barely more than a metre high, made from coarse linen with a band of emblems in all colours of the rainbow running around it. For Chen, the reason he would choose this rather than one of his many stunning paintings is simple. “My daughter picked that tent herself,” he says. “And I value those items more that are more touching.”

Kathrin Hille is the FT’s Greater China correspondent

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram