Located at the main entry road of the Echigo-Tsumari “Kamigo Clove Theatre,” the Hong Kong House has a welcoming design.  

In Asian culture, people bow as a form of greeting. The house imitates this concept, “bowing” twice—in the front to visiting guests, and in the back to a tucked-away shrine—as symbolic reverence to both Japanese and traditional Hong Kong culture. The façades in the front and rear are evocative of the past and future visions of Hong Kong, celebrating the city’s origins as well as its evolution. In homage to its history, the façade is constructed from wooden material recycled from the old red house which stood in the area before its establishment.

The entrance gradually grows from a compact space into a spacious gallery, giving visitors the sense of expanding and contracting, as if shaped by their environment. The wooden interior is meant to be reminiscent of nature, with a minimalist design meant to both capture the elegance of Japanese simplicity, as well as to optimise functional sustainability. Integrated with a passive design, the house is constructed along the principles of Japanese woodlam beam construction, and includes a cross-ventilated layout to emphasise natural lighting. The house itself is designed so that the lower levels can be used as a public space, allowing for use as a gallery, multipurpose room, front desk area, and separate areas for bathrooms and storage rooms. The upper levels are designed for privacy for the artists, with spaces set aside for a kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms with a shower, laundry facilities and a living room.

The interplay between these humble motifs and structural grandeur are meant to celebrate the uniqueness of Hong Kong. The house demonstrates the essence of meaningful design experimentation, cultural fusion, and the harmonic balance between the traditional and the contemporary.