Little Room for Embellishment in Densely Packed Hong Kong

Uniformity in apartment design is very common in Europe too. The smaller the apartment, the more likely it is to have a generic or standardised layout. This is regardless of whether the housing development is "architect designed" or marketed by a volume housebuilder without an architect's name. And regardless of the cost of the apartment too. If you compare a one bedroom flat in the outer suburbs of London, with a high-priced flat in central London, it's highly likely that both flats will have the same standard layout.

Obviously, size affects layout - the more space you have to design with, the greater the layout possibilities. But even small one bedroom apartments can have a wide variety of layouts. You have to look to historical examples for that variety though. New one (and often two) bedroom apartments often have a very uniform design.

For example, the most common template for one bedroom flats in London is usually the combined kitchen/living room (kitchen always at the back of the living room away from the windows) and a windowless bathroom at the back of the flat usually behind the bedroom.

If you search for new build, one bedroom apartments in other European countries like Germany or Sweden, you find a similar bog-standard layout. A bit disappointing.

There is nothing wrong with generic or standardised layouts if they are of a good design. But I've always considered these common combined kitchen/living floor plans to be mediocre in design (but obviously convenient for the housebuilder).

The article also claims that it's a free market. While Hong Kong has a very free-market economy in most things, real estate and development is the one thing where it is less free than most places. It is the part of economy where the government is most involved. The government controls all land, and sells/leases it to developers at a restrictive pace, under its own requirements. There is in fact a lot of land area in Hong Kong, but the government only makes it available to build on in a very limited way. That is really one reason prices are so high, the supply restrictions. The government is fine with that as it keeps prices high when it sells rights to develop land eventually.

This is also one of the least transparent, probably most corrupt, and definitely most expensive and inefficient parts of Hong Kong's economy.

There is probably some role for the government to preserve open space and plan and so on, but to suggest that the free market is at work at the macro level in Hong Kong real estate is ignorance.

Michael Wolf's photos have been on HN a few times, but here's a sampling from his own site: http://photomichaelwolf.com/#architecture-of-densitiy/1

Beyond these boring things, there exists some special interior design: One Kowloon Peak - mickey mouse shape, ASPEN CREST - diamond shape.

Also creative imagination: Oceanaire - 5/F became ground floor.

Search for "奇則" to open your horizon.

One of the investor to the building also invested in Facebook, Waze...