HA TSUEN VILLA
Service
Architectural, Interior Design
Category
Residential, Villa
Location
Yuen Long, Hong Kong
Year
2013
Client
Private
Construction cost
HKD 6,000,000
Area
6,300 sqft
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.
Ha Tsuen Village Houses- Un-volumetrizing Volumes for Living
In Hong Kong, architecture falls victim to the tyranny of faceless 'volumes for living'. In a typical residential developments 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 'volumes for living' that are deliberately devoid of characters. Sold as a tabula rasa, thousands of individual buyers may reinterpret these right-angled volumes to suit their individual needs.
New Territories Exempted Houses (NTEH, colloquially referred to as 'village houses'), which are governed by meta-spatial
descriptions under the Buildings Ordinance (In a nutshell, they are not to exceed 3 stories, 8.23m tall and 700 sq ft roofed area) and often developed by small developers for merely a handful of buyers - offers one the opportunity to rethink whether these meta-spatial descriptions, drastically more flexible than provisions applicable elsewhere, should lead again to the same anonymous living spaces.