Cells with black metal bars line one hall on the ground floor of the North Kowloon Magistracy building. A back stairwell leads up to a small courtroom complete with the bauhinia emblem above the judge's bench, which faces cascading rows of wood-panelled seating. Although distinctly judicial, this is clearly no ordinary courtroom; purple blinds cover the windows, fuchsia-coloured cushions are propped on the benches and a giant flat-panel monitor hangs behind the bench.
The room is now used as a lecture hall and all but one of the cells below, having been carpeted and remodelled, are smart meeting rooms furnished with conference desks and decorated with vibrant paintings. Uniformed police officers and people paying parking fines have been replaced by rowdy - but very stylish - students. The North Kowloon Magistracy has been reborn as a branch of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).
'When we saw this place we were blown away ... We just thought, 'This is it,'' says John Paul Rowan, vice-president of the Hong Kong branch of SCAD. When he first visited the Sham Shui Po building, which features a neoclassical facade, it was disused and the government was casting around for renovation proposals.
'I remember standing across the street and looking up. It was so cool because, from that angle, there are no buildings to the right and the left of it and there's this majestic mountainside behind it,' Rowan says. 'And it was just, 'Ah, this is it.''
SCAD's is the first, and so-far only, completed project under a government revitalisation scheme aimed at conserving the city's heritage while breathing new life into empty, defunct buildings. It is, by most measures, an enormous success, last month winning an honourable mention from the Unesco Asia-Pacific Awards for Culture Heritage Conservation.
Unesco commended the 'creative design', by which the building was adapted for educational use while its original character was retained.
'The project demonstrates the possibilities of adaptive reuse for public buildings ... and is a model for successful public-private co-operation under the framework of the Hong Kong SAR's policy for retaining and optimising the value of heritage buildings,' a Unesco statement read.