Ha Tsuen Villas

The 3 detached villas are making a statement to challenge the conventional “New Territories Exempted Houses“ prototype which has been predefined by stringent government regulation. By lifting, slicing and interlocking different volumes in a three-storey villa, unique external forms and interior spaces are created.

In Hong Kong, architecture falls victim to the tyranny of faceless ‘volumes for living’. In a typical residential development in Hong Kong dictated by stringent statutory control and developers’ financial concerns, architecture is synonymous to the act of collective buying and selling of homogeneous living.

New Territories Exempted Houses (NTEH, collectively referred to as ‘village houses’), which are governed by meta-spatial descriptions under the Buildings Ordinance (that are not to exceed 3 stories, 8.23m tall and 700 sq ft roofed area).

In designing the Ha Tsuen Villas, we have taken 3 stories as it is than a set of meta-spatial descriptions with an open-ended raison d’être. Within this boundary, we allowed floors, walls and openings to clash with, juxtapose with and defy against each other; we pushed, pulled, interlocked volumes of living spaces, slashed through wall to let slits of light in here, chiselled monoliths of volumes to leave crevasses within which staircases snake through, pry open masses to create soaring clerestory atria and- in other words- fissured an imaginary, orthogonal three-dimensional boundary permitted under the Ordinance. Pointe-ing at equilibrium, every wall, slab and door revolts against the hegemony of the monotonous ‘volumes for living’. They blur the boundary between the inside and the outside; they unfold volumes into platforms for spontaneous uses; they allow masses to float, walls to dissolve, partitions to be torn open and, most importantly, they form a staccatoed, rhythmic series of spaces that allow human activities to expand and contract within accordingly.

Awards: 

2014 Hong Kong Institute of Architects Annual Award [Residential Group]