About Halcyon Hall
A studio for the slow craft of mediation.
We teach the conversational practice of holding a difficult room — not as theory, but as something done with the hands.
Return HomeOur story
A room above Hollywood Road.
Halcyon Hall began in 2018, in two small offices that we rented and quietly knocked into one. The wall came down so the chairs could move into a circle. That single change — taking out a wall to make a round room — has come to feel like a small picture of the work we do.
Our founders were practicing mediators in Hong Kong who kept noticing the same thing in client work: people in difficult conversations rarely needed more information. What they needed was a steadier way to listen, the language to frame what was being said, and the patience to let strong feelings settle before reaching for a solution. Those skills, we found, can be taught — but only by practicing them, slowly, in a room where mistakes are welcome.
So we built a workshop studio rather than a lecture hall. The studio holds twelve at most. The chairs sit in a circle. There is tea, there are notebooks, there is a long afternoon ahead. We have run workshops here, in this same room, for groups of in-house counsel, for school deans, for hospital managers, for charity boards, for community workers. Each group brings its own difficulties; the practice underneath stays much the same.
We are a small studio on purpose. We turn down work we cannot do well. We try to write to people the way we'd want to be written to, and to teach the way we'd want to be taught.
Facilitators
The people in the room.
Our facilitators are working mediators with mixed practice backgrounds — civil and commercial mediation, restorative work in schools, organisational consulting. They take turns leading workshops; one will hold the room while another sits with the small groups.
Winnie Lai
Lead Facilitator
Accredited mediator with ten years in commercial and workplace cases. Particularly interested in how silence works in a room.
Daniel Chiu
Facilitator
Background in school counselling and restorative practice. Brings a careful attentiveness to power and to who isn't speaking.
Priya Tang
Facilitator
Worked for a decade in organisational HR before training as a mediator. Co-leads our In-House Team Workshops.
Marcus Ng
Studio Lead
Holds the workshop logistics — pre-reading, scheduling, the follow-up call. Trained mediator and former community legal worker.
How we work
Standards we hold ourselves to.
A set of practices that shape every workshop, written here so participants know what to expect of us.
Confidentiality of the room
What is said in the workshop stays in the workshop. Facilitators do not discuss participants outside the room, and we ask participants to extend the same care to one another.
Mediation accreditation
Lead facilitators are accredited under the Hong Kong Mediation Accreditation Association General Mediator scheme, with continuing professional development logged annually.
Practice-led design
We design our workshops around practice rounds rather than lectures. Materials are revised after every cohort based on what worked and what didn't.
Care for difficult material
Workshops touch on strong emotion. We use scenarios rather than personal cases as a default, and the facilitator team is trained to notice when someone needs a quiet step out.
Privacy of enquiries
Notes you send through the enquiry form are read by facilitators and the studio lead only, and are kept for the duration of your engagement with us. See our Privacy Policy for detail.
Small numbers, on purpose
We cap groups at twelve. The cap is a teaching choice, not a marketing one — it's the number at which everyone gets enough chair time across two days.
Practice and values
A few things we believe.
Mediation skills are not a personality trait. They are habits of attention that anyone can build, given a room to practice in and patient feedback. Some people start the work easily and some find it harder; almost everyone moves forward by the end of two days, in ways that surprise them.
The hardest moment in most difficult conversations is not the start of the disagreement. It's the moment afterwards, when someone has spoken sharply and the room goes still. What you do in that second matters more than your opening words. We spend a lot of workshop time in that small, quiet place.
Listening is not waiting to talk. It is a particular activity — checking what was said, holding what wasn't said, noticing what shifted in the speaker as they spoke. People who practice this find it changes the rest of their conversational life as well.
Framing matters. The way a dispute is described early on tends to shape the way it gets handled. A neutral framing isn't the same as a vague one; we work on the difference.
Self-care for facilitators isn't an afterthought. It's the thing that lets us keep doing the work without becoming brittle. Every workshop ends with a session on what to take home and what to leave behind.
Halcyon Hall is in Hong Kong, and our work is shaped by that. The conversations our participants navigate are often multilingual, multigenerational, and held inside organisations with their own histories. We try to leave room for all of that in the practice.
Come and see the room.
If you'd like to talk through whether one of our workshops is right for your work, send us a short note. There's no obligation, and we'd rather have a careful conversation than rush a booking.
Send a Note