House for a Filmmaker by New Office Works: Hong Kong Apartment with Brick and Timber

House for a Filmmaker reworks a high-rise apartment as a compact country house, using handmade clay brick, timber joinery, and soft textiles to build a quiet domestic core. Sliding glass partitions allow the reading room and dining area to merge for gatherings or separate for solitary work, while an adjacent editing room provides controlled light and acoustic buffering. The palette tempers the scale of the interior and moderates daylight, establishing a warm, tactile backdrop for both daily life and screen-based practice.

House for a Filmmaker Technical Information

• Architects: New Office Works
• Location: Evergreen Villa, Hong Kong, China
• Project Years: 2023 – 2025
• Photographs: Courtesy of New Office Works

We treated the apartment as a compact country house, using thickened surfaces and soft thresholds to organize daily life and work.

– New Office Works Architects

Rural Warmth in an Urban Apartment

The project translates a country-house sensibility into an urban setting through a restrained, tactile palette. Handmade clay bricks, timber, and woven textiles are coordinated to create a domestic core that resists the thinness of typical apartment fit-outs. The approach favors mass, texture, and surface depth over applied finishes, so walls read as built rather than merely lined.

Beige brickwork with a faint pink undertone anchors the living and dining areas. The bricks modulate daylight by scattering highlights and softening contrast, which produces a gentle, diffuse atmosphere across the main rooms. This calibrated reflectance provides social spaces with a consistent tonal base throughout the day, supporting reading, conversation, and dining without glare.

Material continuity extends from the entry into the living, dining, and reading zones, tempering the scale of the high-rise interior. Timber joinery ties storage and thresholds into the brick surfaces, so furniture volumes feel integrated rather than freestanding. The palette is deliberately limited, which enhances the plan’s legibility and allows small adjustments in lighting and textiles to register clearly.

Plan Flexibility and Program for a Filmmaker

Sliding glass partitions between the reading room and dining area enable the apartment to switch between compact everyday living and larger social configurations. When open, the long side of the plan reads as a continuous field, with clear sightlines from the entry to the windows. When closed, the reading room becomes a quiet enclave without severing visual continuity or daylight.

Transparency at entry is preserved to maintain spatial depth and a sense of generosity within a limited area. The threshold logic is simple: large openings align along the primary axis, and secondary doors stack near walls to minimize visual noise. This lets the apartment toggle quickly between open and closed states, supporting different work and hosting rhythms without reconfiguring furniture.

A dedicated editing room pairs proximity to the living spaces with calibrated environmental control. Soft wall and floor finishes provide acoustic damping for extended screen work, while controlled daylight limits reflections on monitors. The room is close enough to the social core for easy circulation yet buffered enough to allow concentration and sound separation.

Tectonics and Light Modulation

The brick surfaces are treated as crafted backdrops rather than decorative veneers. Junctions with timber are handled to emphasize thickness: deep reveals, splayed returns, and integrated shelving articulate the envelope’s mass. This reading of the wall as an element, not a lining, lends a sense of permanence and organizes the placement of objects and lighting.

Roman blinds filter sunlight to reduce glare while maintaining a low-contrast luminance field suitable for reading and screen-based tasks. Their soft folds temper specular reflections from the glazed partitions and align with the project’s emphasis on tactile, adjustable layers. The combination of diffuse daylight and textured surfaces yields stable brightness without resorting to heavy blackout strategies during the day.

A globe pendant system complements the filtered daylight with balanced ambient illumination over dining and living areas. The fixtures are positioned to avoid hotspots on the brick while providing sufficient vertical illuminance for faces and tabletops. Supplementary task lighting remains secondary, so the overall scheme relies first on controlled natural light, then on calm, legible artificial sources.

Longevity and Environmental Intent

Material selection favors durability and potential reuse. Brick and solid timber extend service life and reduce replacement cycles, while demountable components, such as the glass partitions, can be reconfigured or removed without sacrificial finishes. The tectonic clarity of walls, openings, and joinery also simplifies maintenance over time.

The brick’s interior thermal mass moderates short-term temperature swings, especially beneficial in a humid, high-solar-gain climate. Daylight control through blinds and reflective brick surfaces lessens dependence on artificial lighting during peak hours. Together, these measures reduce operational loads without compromising visual comfort.

Adaptability is embedded in the plan. Multi-use rooms, sliding thresholds, and integrated storage accommodate evolving domestic and work requirements, from larger gatherings to focused editing sessions. The capacity to reassign spaces with minimal construction extends the life of the interior, aligning spatial organization with long-term environmental and social resilience.

About New Office Works

New Office Works is an architecture and design studio based in Hong Kong, founded in 2014. The firm is dedicated to creating inventive spaces and objects that bridge historical architectural vocabularies with contemporary needs. Their design approach emphasizes rigorous exploration of detail, material experimentation, and careful studies of finishes and textures. Projects range from architecture and interiors to installations and furniture, reflecting their commitment to craft and thoughtful spatial experiences.

Credits and Additional Notes

1. Client: Evergreen Villa
2. Other contributors: Krause Bricks (handcrafted clay bricks)
3. Other contributors: Verner Panton (VP Globe pendant lighting design)