Humble post-war buildings reinvented as modern apartment blocks in Hong Kong - it’s a bit like playing Tetris, architect says of the challenge
- Walk-up buildings in Hong Kong have been turned into stylish apartments by big developers, giving new life to blocks that are everywhere in the urban landscape
- Architects explain how they bring out the character of the buildings known as tong lau, whose style one likens to the minimalist modernism of Mies van der Rohe
A decade ago, it seemed only a small band of heritage aficionados were renovating individual flats in Hong Kong’s tong lau, the walk-up tenement buildings that define the city’s urban landscape.
Then came developers with the resources to revamp entire buildings.
They included 11 Upper Station Street, a six-storey tenement off Hollywood Road in Sheung Wan that was converted into two luxury duplexes in 2011, and the eight-floor Tung Fat Building in Kennedy Town, whose seaside curves were given an upscale treatment in 2014.
That was the case at 379 Queen’s Road Central, where the architects at Australian firm PMDL turned an unmemorable tong lau into five floors of stylish, compact serviced apartments that sit atop a ground-level retail space.
“There are so many of these post-war tong lau in the city and there is so much development potential in them,” says Donncha O’Brien, PMDL’s Hong Kong project lead.