The Red House

Kam Tin, Hong Kong

year: 2009
status: built
type: private house
area: 120m2
cost: undisclosed

The Red House is a small pavilion structure forming a part of a garden created by our client, a grandfather to welcome his granddaughters. There already exists in the garden a white house, a blue house and a restored bus.

The design for the Red House attempts to flip the constraints imposed by following the original footprints of a cluster of blocks into design parameter. The necessity to follow the heights is answered by a sloping roof that in turn informs the new form of the house. Internally, the rooms are arranged to keep the cores compact and leave the living space as a continuous landscape, with a subtle level difference to answer the drop in the garden.

Conceptually, the Red House is a red surface that wraps around, leaving a void that allows the garden to 'sweep through'. The long elevations are composed of large, full-height windows with infilled panels tessellated with tiles of two profiles, recalling the Portuguese identity of our client, while the red short elevations are punched with small windows.

Design Team: Annette Chu, Raymond Leung, Derek Fok