Adjusting to the small living space in Hong Kong

Aug 10 2015

In a metropolitan city like Hong Kong, every inch of living space is precious and expensive. One of the first things that most foreigners realize when settling in Hong Kong is that Hong Kong apartments are not particularly roomy. Consolidating possessions and finiding innovative ways to store belongings is essential as space is valued premium. This article will help you adjust to the living spaces in Hong Kong by cutting down on clutter and providing some interior design tips for small flats.

Furniture

How do you strike a balance between making your room feel as spacious as possbile while also squeezing in extra seating? What furniture should you choose and where should you position it?

Let’s get started off with the bed.

1. Storage Beds: A bed that also acts as storage space is a great idea. Its multi-functional, practical and helps you utilise as much space as possbile.

2. Fold-Down Wall Beds: If there isn’t enough floor space for a good bed, then try a fold-down bed for your small bedroom! These beds are fixtures that can be attached to walls and make your bedroom feel much more spacious. Don’t be deterred by any pre-conceived notions of how a fold-down wall bed might look as they can be stylish and convenient.

What about tables and chairs?

1. Coffe Tables: For those who must have a coffee table in the living room, its important to pick one that comes with comfortable stools that can discretely slide under. You won't have to stock up on extra chairs if guests come over and If there are too many people for the couch, you can easily slide the stool out.

2. Extendable Tables: An extendable table with stackable or foldable chairs are a godsend for a small living room. Go for stackable chairs if you aren’t a fan of how foldable chairs look, and go for foldable chairs if you want to save just a little more space.

Where can one buy spacing saving furniture in Hong Kong?

In Hong Kong, IKEA is a good place to start. Their furniture is inexpensive and well-designed for the local market. You can check out their online catalogues to get a better grasp of what they have to offer at: http://www.ikea.com/hk/en/. Other furniture stores include: BoConcept, Stockroom, Tequila Kola, and PriceRite.

Entertainment

If you love watching TV shows, you need your weekly fix of Game of Thrones, Suits, and True Detective. But sometimes you don’t really have the space for a large HDTV and a couch in a small apartment, or the space to arrange the couch to be an adequate distance away from the TV to protect your eyes. You want to buy that TV in time to for the episode showing tomorrow, but you know in the back of your head that you simply don’t have the space to fit it in. What do you do?

Firstly, you may want to reconsider buying that TV. What you can do to save space is to invest in buying or building a quality computer with a large 30-inch monitor. Online streaming services can push all entertainment straight to your computer, with a multitude of available options including Netflix, Hulu, Cloudload, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play. Although these services are subscription based, you can skip out on commercials.

While you can always go into a Fortress Store in a mall to buy a computer, you can also go to any of the following technical hotspots to have a greater variety of choices. You can even hire someone to custom build your computer at these places: Mong Kok Computer Centre, Sham Shui Po Golden Computer Arcade, and the Wan Chai Computer Centre.

For the gamer, you can also connect your PlayStation or Xbox to your computer monitor, and a quality computer has the capacity to play a multitude of games offered by online video game markets like Steam and Origin. Buying games online and storing them in an online library can save you from having to reserve space for a shelf.

On the topic of shelves, you can ease shelf space by buying an eBook reader. Whilst copies of The Brothers Karamazov, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Les Misérables sitting on your shelf would undoubtedly make an impression on visitors, these books are more often than not just sitting there collecting dust after you’ve finished reading it. Buying an eBook reader not only saves you space at home, since all your books are saved within the reader, but it also makes reading on the go less of a hassle. EBook readers are a smaller, lighter, and an environmentally friendlier alternative to their paper book counterparts.

Popular eBook readers at the moment namely are: the Amazon Kindle (and its many variants), the NOOK GlowLight, and the Kobo line of eBook readers.

Still need more space?

So you’ve already done everything that this article has suggested, but you still don’t have enough living space and there are some things that you just cannot bear to part with. It might be a gift from your dad. It could be an heirloom. Whatever it might be, it’s something that you aren’t going to use any time soon, but it’s not something that you can just throw away.

For items like these, you can look into renting a storage space in Hong Kong. There are many businesses offering affordable storage space that come in a variety of options and service providers to choose from. If you cannot bear to permanently part with a few personal items, you may want to look into these sort of services.

Some vendors that provide storage services in Hong Kong are: room+, cube self storage, Hongkong Storage, and Lock+Store Self Storage.

Hong Kong is a densely populated city but we can still find ways to create comfortable living spaces. You can create a larger living space for yourself by acquiring the right space saving furniture and offloading infrequently used items to storage.