Felicia Hung Is Lighting the Way for a More Inclusive Design World

In 2018, Felicia Hung launched In Common With, a Brooklyn-based design studio focused on lighting, with friend and former classmate Nick Ozemba. The brand holds collaboration—with artisans, with designs, with emerging voices—as a core value, a tenet taken directly from Hung’s furniture-design education.

And last year, the pair opened Quarters, a Manhattan space conceived as both a showroom for In Common With and a bar and gathering place for friends of the brand. Since then, the second-floor space has hosted countless guests, magazine shoots, and events for high-profile brands. Although it seems like—and might even qualify as—an overnight success, Hung had a long road to get to this point. In our latest installment of Doing the Work, Glamour caught up with the founder and thought leader to dive into her process.

Glamour: What time do you get up in the morning?

Felicia Hung: I usually get up around 7:30, 7:45. I would love to be an early riser, but I’m not.

What’s your general morning routine?

I have a dog who is very excited about everything and really cute. There’s a lot of excitement in the morning for her, so that helps me wake up a little bit. And [then] just the usual: Shower, put my face things on, and get out the door. I walk to work right now, which is really nice. My partner walks with me with our dog. It’s a nice little slowdown before going into a crazy day. I usually [get to the office] around 9. I don’t do too much, and I don’t eat breakfast. I’m not a breakfast person. If I eat breakfast, I get more hungry throughout the day. So I don’t, which is not good for me, but I’m not a morning person.

How do you take your coffee?

I take it with some oat milk and no sugar. I love tea, but I go through phases of only drinking matcha and then phases of going back to coffee, because coffee does give me that jolt that matcha doesn’t. But for my health, I try to have matcha. I love a hojicha latte, too, and then right now, I’ve been drinking iced espressos.

What was your first childhood dream job?

I think I wanted to be a teacher just because that’s the job I knew existed. I didn’t know I wanted to go into design or art until high school. I had an interest in it, but I grew up in the Bay Area, and it was very tech-focused and not very artistic. I don’t want to be a teacher at all now, but I think it was just like, Oh, this is what people do. This is an adult.