A Hong Kong house that is a slice of Australia
A lot of thought and careful planning went into transforming a bare 2,100-sq-ft shell of a house in Sai Kung into one that was bright, airy and reminded its residents of home
It took Andrew and Susan Sams seven years of searching to find their Sai Kung house, and just minutes to decide to buy it.
“My son, Reilly, walked in and said, ‘It looks like Australia,’” says Susan Sams. “It’s the view of the sea through the eucalyptus trees. We call it our little slice of Sydney in Hong Kong.”
When they found it 10 years ago, the 2,100-sq-ft house was a shell. The previous owner had stopped midway through a renovation. None of the walls had plaster, the floor had been ripped up and, in the living space, the external wall to the garden was missing entirely. And that was what sold them on it.
“It was a blank canvas. All that was here were some mood boards – all yin-yang and marble – and the pool, which was under tarpaulin. The contractors refused to show it to us, so we weren’t entirely sure what was under there,” Sams recalls. “But we liked the view through the open wall – the trees were smaller then – so we decided to make that wall purely glass.”
WATCH: Inside Andrew and Susan Sams’ Sai Kung house