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Published May 29, 2010

Personal space

Niche living defined

Gary Chang has taken the concept of using small spaces creatively to brave new extremes. By Geoffrey Eu


HOW many rooms can you squeeze into a 355-square-foot home? The answer, believe it or not, is more than a thousand - but only if you happen to be Gary Chang, a designer who has been preoccupied by the near-limitless potential of the same small space for more than 30 years.


GENIUS
In a space not much bigger than a single-car garage, Chang has built a home that - depending on his inclination - can be a minimalist living room, a walk-in closet, a sizeable home office, a kitchen, dining room, bedroom, home cinema, spa, bedroom, guest room and even a relaxation room, complete with hammock and mood music






Chang, 47, has a thriving architectural and interior design practice in Hong Kong, a city where the majority of people live in shoebox-sized apartments and a luxury development is simply defined as a bigger shoebox in a better neighbourhood. The award-winning designer found his niche, so to speak, by transforming a tiny apartment - his former family home in Quarry Bay - into an evolutionary space, one that changes according to his individual needs. By using a complex series of sliding panels and curtains, movable walls and fold-down furniture to serve as room dividers and make creative use of limited space, Chang has taken the concept to brave new extremes and near-obsessive levels. The various permutations and combinations are enough to keep most mathematicians busy for weeks.

Chang's seventh-storey apartment in a non-descript 1960s building represents a defining moment in a career spent turning less into a whole lot more. This is a home, after all, whose starring role in a YouTube video has received more than two million hits from around the world.

'I try to argue that the problem of living in small spaces is a global phenomenon,' says Chang. 'Many major cities have to deal with similar issues - Hong Kong has a long history of working with the idea of tight spaces, but small doesn't have to mean depressing.'

In a space not much bigger than a single-car garage, Chang has built a home that - depending on his inclination - can be a minimalist living room, a walk-in closet, a sizeable home office, a kitchen, dining room, bedroom, home cinema, spa, bedroom, guest room and even a relaxation room, complete with hammock and mood music.

There is also a sophisticated home automation system to help with the transformations, while various elements have multiple-uses - such as a full-size home cinema screen that also serves as a blackout curtain. The windows to the apartment are tinted yellow-orange so that there is a soothing golden glow to the space no matter what the weather is like outside. It's not quite smoke and mirrors, but it comes pretty close.

Incredibly, there is also ample storage space throughout. His music rack, for example, holds 2,000 CDs, while there is also a mini-business centre, various kitchen appliances, a rack that hold a dozen purpose-designed fold-out stools and a built-in movie projector - that's in addition to the flat-screen TV, of course. There's quite a bit of pulling and pushing involved - the heaviest item is the fold-down Murphy bed - but everything seems to work just fine. It's a space where the outrageous meets the practical head-on.

The catch, of course, is that the space can mostly be only one thing at a time - the shower and toilet area are permanent fixtures, while the full-size bathtub is tucked away behind a panel, with a fold-up guest bed above the tub - but it's a condition that Chang, who is single, took into account from the start. In other words, he tailored the space to fit his own specific needs. He calls his home the Domestic Transformer.

'The key factor is that I take a time-based approach,' he says. At any one time you are only doing one thing, so instead of moving from space to space, the same space changes at different times for different needs.'

He adds, 'It is not entirely innovative, but a response to what we've always been doing - everything was always mutating due to the lack of space.' As a teenager, Chang slept on a couch in a corridor in the same home, which was partitioned into three bedrooms - one for his parents, another for his three sisters and a third, amazingly enough, for a tenant.

After his parents moved to a bigger home, Chang bought the apartment over 20 years ago for about HK$350,000. He has since spent many times that amount reinventing the space every decade or so. The latest version took a year and HK$1.8 million to design and renovate - everything had to be precise down to the last millimetre, and the physical constraints meant that people could only work on one section at a time. The primary materials used are stainless steel and polished granite. He estimates the current value of the home to be HK$1.6 million. 'I have a very different concept of money,' he says.

'A lot of architects use their own homes to experiment,' he adds, 'We should explore our own living environment and I don't really care how much I spend - it's a testing ground for me.' Says Chang, 'I'm not finished - it's like a game to try and squeeze in more elements - the next stage is a mahjong table for my friends.'

Naturally, Chang attributes his ideas about space to growing up in a proverbial shoebox, but he has since proven that the same space can actually be liberating, not limiting. 'It was my problem because I grew up that way,' he says. 'During my childhood, many tenants had full height wallpapers with pictures of waterfalls or forests to give them the idea of space - each generation had their way of making their home more tolerable.'

He adds, 'Nowadays, people are more concerned with designing their home with the resale value in mind, rather than customising it to suit their lifestyles.' Chang's own lifestyle involves travelling about 120 days a year, and he has even published a book Hotel as Home, where he describes each of the individual hotel rooms he has stayed in.

'Traditionally, the hotel and home are poles apart but it's more of a blur these days and things are not so well-defined anymore,' he says. 'Each room or function is not rigidly defined anymore, and my ideas have to do with flexibility, the ability to choose and a blurring of the boundaries between different parts of the house - you don't have to see something when it isn't in use.'

Says Chang, 'My home may not be the ultimate way to transform a space, but the central spirit is the same - you look closely at your own life, see what you want, and organise the space accordingly.'

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