With the ever-growing need for residential care institutions, the Hong Kong government has employed a variety of tactics to provide enough units to keep up with the demand for subsidised units, including buying out spaces in private homes and subsidising the resident. More recently, planning has been approved for a large scale, government-built residential care home located in Kwu Tung North, designed to accommodate 1764 residents across 7 floors. Named the "Multi-Welfare Services Complex", the ground floor of the complex consists of day care and hostel units. I sat down with Ms Xenia Kwan, senior project manager of ArchSD, to discuss Residential Care Homes for Elderly (RCHE) design, management, regulations, and the differences in care home projects for the private sector as compared to the public.
Despite perceiving to have more design freedom in working on public RCHE projects as compared to private, Kwan noted the lack of communication with the end user as a public project; once the construction nears completion, an operator would then be tendered, hence the design may not necessarily serve their operational needs as well as it could. She emphasized that plot ratio and maximising the number of units were still of high priority as well. With very few small conversation corners for communal use outside of the multi-purpose hall and the standard layout of six-persons rooms used across the entire building, she comments on the difficulty in creating the experience of true privacy and at the end of life, "truly being at peace". Although a new ordinance mandating private and contract care homes must include an end-of-life room, the project gained approval before its enactment in 2017, and the Social Welfare Department (SWD) opted to continue without the addition of these rooms.
"Now, the government wants to exhaust what available land there is so if we build with a very low plot ratio, there will be members of the legislative assembly criticising us. "Why, for such a large plot of land, would you build so low and few, why not more?" Like that. In Hong Kong it is different."
"If there is a plot of land where we can construct one block like this again, it would be better than being in an existing building and just inserting one or two floors [of RCHE]."
"The operators and Social Welfare Department: compared to us designers, their thinking is very different. We want to [design] it better, with more communal space, but they do not think in such way. They will focus on the maintenance and return cost perspective."
Through our conversation it became clear that the SWD has greatest control over design regulations. An example of this is that despite the availability of new fire prevention enhancement measures, the existing 24m maximum height restriction for care homes must be observed regardless of technological advances. Following our interview I attempted to reach out to the SWD who turned down the request as they preferred not to communicate with the public about the project details or their opinion.
Despite the limitations working against the ideal image of a care home in Hong Kong, the Multi-Welfare Services Complex is a design which allows for social interactions with the large communal spaces and permeable day care services. With the foundation work on site commencing, I look forward to seeing the project develop and its completion.
