New lease of life: Hong Kong's historic stone houses revitalised for tourists
Stone cottages built during war and later used by film studios revitalised for tourists with a mid-20th century nostalgic cafe and labyrinth gardens
A row of five stone houses built during the war that later became part of a Kowloon City squatter village has been restored into a tourist and heritage centre.
The HK$39.1 million Stone Houses Family Garden is the first of three scheduled projects to be completed under batch two of a government scheme to revitalise historic buildings.
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During the second world war, the Japanese built a cluster of cottages on the site to rehouse residents from villages they razed to make way for Kai Tak airport.
When refugees poured into the city after civil war broke out on the mainland, it became a squatter area that was later named Hau Wong Temple New Village.
It later housed the operations of several film studios, and in the 1960s and 1970s small cottage factories and ateliers.
The squatter area was cleared out in 2001, but the five Chinese vernacular houses remained on the site. The two-storey granite Chinese-style tenement building is built with pitched roofs made of timber rafters and covered with Chinese pan and roll tiles.