How 3 Hong Kong apartments on 2 levels became 1, with 8 bedrooms and over 5,000 sq ft of space to provide plenty of privacy for a multi-generational family
- A family bought a flat one floor above their two adjoining apartments, knocking the walls through and adding a staircase to create one huge home
- Interior designer Clifton Leung had the tricky task of accommodating everyone’s diverse tastes and lifestyles and ensuring connection, but also separation
If the thought of sharing a home with your parents, brother, spouse and adult son brings you out in a rash, talk to Elaine Choi, who has enjoyed multi-generational living for years.
With the help of interior designer Clifton Leung, of Clifton Leung Design Workshop, she even managed to navigate the often choppy waters of a full-home renovation, ticking everyone’s boxes in the process.
“We had been living in two adjoining apartments here in Pak Shek Kok [in Tai Po, in the New Territories] for about seven years when the opportunity arose to buy one of the flats on the floor above.
“We decided to make the three properties into one connected home to make living together more comfortable,” says Choi, who moved into a nearby apartment with her family for 14 months while the renovations were taking place.
It was, says Leung, an interesting but sizeable project. Not only did he have to deal with the structural aspects of combining several flats into an eight-bedroom, 5,355 sq ft (497 square metre) duplex; he also had family dynamics and the requirements, tastes and lifestyles of six people and staff to accommodate.
“What made it easier was that they had already lived together in two-thirds of the space so they didn’t have to imagine what it would be like,” says Leung. “They knew exactly what they wanted in terms of communal and private areas – and, of course, storage.”
