Victoria Coast is a regenerated 42-storey residential development in the Hong Kong neighbourhood of Pok Fu Lam. In this major retrofit project, we’ve transformed the 30-year-old towers and podium into a modern, desirable place to live.
Delivered for Chinachem Group, our design for Victoria Coast champions the benefits of retrofit; it saves embodied carbon and enhances the quality of the interiors as well as the efficiency of the building. From the initial brief – which had all options on the table from demolition and rebuild to re-use and refurbishment – we were determined to retain as much of the existing structure as possible. The original scheme was popular with residents, owing to its close proximity to schools and the nearby Country Park, with the South China Sea to the west and Victoria Peak to the east. Making the most of this stunning location, only 30 minutes from Central, our primary goal was to uplift the apartments and optimise the towers to not only meet current building standards but also reposition them for a private sales market.
Sitting atop an 8-storey podium, the two perpendicular towers open out towards the west, taking in dramatic views of the South China Sea, while the cores are located to the east, facing towards the mountains and providing privacy to neighbours. The 118 apartments range from 2 to 3 bedrooms, with each tower containing 2 apartments on each level. The top of the podium features a multipurpose residents’ clubhouse, where we included various indoor and outdoor spaces to support family and working life, as well as health and wellbeing.
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When the client first approached us, the brief was to do a light refurbishment and refresh the apartments. However, following the impact of COVID-19, the brief pivoted towards a more interventionist approach to reposition the apartments for a sales market. Although this shift gave us a bigger budget and expanded the opportunities we had to work with, our ambition was still to retain as much as possible and work with the bones of the existing building. We kept all the structural cores and slabs, as well as the 8-storey podium and the balconies for each apartment, then dismantled the facades and stripped out the interiors to give ourselves a blank canvas to work from. This allowed us to reconfigure and uplift the apartments using the original structure.
To give the buildings a renewed identity, we reclad the two towers with a monochrome curtain wall facade, integrating the original balconies off the living spaces. Architectural aluminium vertical fins improve privacy for each apartment, and the monochrome materiality and the rhythm of the balconies express the verticality of the scheme. One of our key objectives was to maximise natural light, fresh air and sea views, so we introduced full-height openable windows to the living spaces and bedrooms. As the development faces west and is fairly exposed on the hillside, we chose a grey-tinted glass to reduce solar glare and thermal discomfort while maintaining the spectacular views.
As the towers are viewed from all sides, we designed different facades for the different elevations. Continuing the monochrome theme, we reclad the core elevations with a waterfall-style tiled pattern that further emphasises the verticality of the towers, breaking down the massing and simultaneously camouflaging the windows in the stairwells.
