In the bustling and crowded city that is Hong Kong, physical space is very much at a premium. Living space in particular in this city at least is as precious vertically as it is horizontally with towering apartment blocks and offices dominating the Hong Kong skyline. One apartment in particular however stands out above all else in this densely populated urban metropolis. It belongs to Gary Chang, a 47 year old designer whose turned his tiny 7th floor apartment into a fully fledged 24 roomed living space.
Here is a video taken from the Discovery Channel showing Gary Chang and his amazing apartment: (to skip the intro, jump to 0:40)
Quite an ingenious method of converting a tiny 344-square foot apartment into 24 different layouts. I especially like the way he’s got a mirrored floor and ceiling which not only hides the tracks and all but really makes the room look a lot larger than it actually is.
This is a biography of Mr. Chang’s life as taken from the New York Times:
Mr. Chang, 46, has lived in this seventh-floor apartment since he was 14, when he moved in with his parents and three younger sisters; they rented it from a woman who owned so much property that she often forgot to collect payment.
Like most of the 370 units in the 17-story building, which dates to the 1960s, the small space was partitioned into several tiny rooms — in this case, three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom and a hallway. Mr. Chang’s parents shared the master bedroom (though when they first moved in, his father lived in the United States, where he worked as a waiter at Chinese restaurants in various cities). His sisters shared a second bedroom, and the third, almost incredibly — although not unusually for Hong Kong — was occupied by a tenant, a woman in her 20s, whom Mr. Chang remembers only for the space she took up.
Mr. Chang slept in the hallway, on a sofa bed.
…
Mr. Chang was then working for the P&T Group, an architectural firm, and living in a rented room near the University of Hong Kong, where he had studied architecture. His mother suggested that he take over the lease on their old apartment, “because the rent was unusually low,” he said. Instead he bought it, for about $45,000.
He had been itching to tear down the walls since his teenage years, when he sketched new designs for the family home, and he then began in earnest. In the last two decades, he has renovated four times, on progressively bigger budgets as his company, Edge Design Institute, has grown. His latest effort, which took a year and cost just over $218,000, he calls the “Domestic Transformer.”
Source: NY Times
The apartment is as stylish as it is functional and really is, quite amazing.
