Pavilia Farm Clubhouses is a network of four communal buildings embedded within a planted residential podium in Tai Wai, Hong Kong. Designed by Snøhetta, the project uses water, urban farming, recreation, and intergenerational programs to turn the space between high-rise housing towers into a sequence of shared landscapes and rooms.
Pavilia Farm Clubhouses Technical Information
- ArchitectsSnøhetta
- LocationTai Wai, Hong Kong
- Gross Area5,650 m2 | 60,858 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2017 – 2026
- Photographs© Harold de Puymorin
The clubhouses are conceived as a sequence of experiences woven through the development and connected by movement, nature, and community.
– Snøhetta
Landscape as Social Infrastructure
Pavilia Farm occupies a landscaped podium beneath dense residential towers in Tai Wai, where Hong Kong’s vertical development model often compresses the scale of collective space. Rather than treating the podium as residual amenity ground, the project establishes it as a low, horizontal terrain of planted terraces, pools, paths, and pavilions. This constructed landscape provides a deliberate counterweight to the dark, repetitive mass of the surrounding housing blocks, while maintaining visual contact with the hills beyond the site.
Long, curving planters in grey stone define the podium’s topography. Their retaining edges also form seats, informal steps, and boundaries for cultivated plots, allowing the same element to operate structurally, socially, and horticulturally. Paths move between dense planting, lawns, and water features rather than following a single axial route. The result is an environmental system in which circulation is not simply a means of reaching facilities, but an opportunity to encounter gardens, neighbors, and changing seasonal conditions.
Four Clubhouses and a Distributed Civic Sequence
The project is organized around four distinct clubhouses: Tea House, Well House, Farm House, and Sky House. Each carries a particular programmatic identity, but none is conceived as an isolated object. Pedestrian paths, pools, planted terraces, and shared outdoor areas connect them, creating a distributed sequence that encourages residents to move through the site. This spatial arrangement gives communal life a geographic dimension, making the journey between activities part of the social infrastructure.
Tea House establishes an arrival condition centered on reflection and water. Well House shifts toward exercise, swimming, and recovery, while Farm House supports collective cooking and dining beside the urban farm. Sky House brings play, learning, music, and senior recreation into a more vertically organized setting. Together, these buildings propose a neighborhood-scale reading of the residential clubhouse. Their programs are separated enough to retain distinct atmospheres, yet close enough for daily routines to overlap across generations and household types.
Materiality, Thresholds, and Environmental Atmosphere
A consistent material framework binds the four buildings to the podium. Mottled grey and charcoal stone block clads the lower levels, visually extending the retaining walls and terraced garden edges into the architecture. Above, warm-grey rendered volumes reduce the clubhouses’ apparent weight and introduce a more domestic scale. The contrast between rough stone bases and smooth upper forms clarifies the buildings’ relationship to ground: they appear embedded in the landscape while remaining legible as sheltered communal rooms.
Environmental transitions are carefully staged through water, glazing, skylights, and covered exterior spaces. At Tea House, a glazed cantilevered pavilion overlooks the garden as a waterfall drops into the pool below, making sound, humidity, and reflected light part of the threshold experience. Well House extends its swimming pool beneath a low rendered volume, with glazing between columns allowing the water to register as continuous across interior and exterior conditions. Inside Farm House, timber ceilings, ridge glazing, built-in shelving, and sliding glass panels create a more tactile setting for shared meals, framing both the cultivated terraces and distant mountains without separating them from the room.
Sky House and Intergenerational Spatial Design
Sky House concentrates a broad range of age-specific and shared programs within a circular building on a stone-clad podium. The ground level is organized as an indoor play landscape of terracotta rubber mounds, slides, trampolines, climbing elements, and timber structures. Rather than treating play as equipment placed within a neutral room, the interior turns the floor itself into an inhabitable topography. Curved surfaces, inset paths, and low hills invite movement across the space, while full-height glazing maintains a visual exchange with the outdoor playground and planted setting.
At the center, a tall rope-climbing tower rises through a cylindrical void toward a domed skylight. This atrium gives the building a vertical social focus, connecting the play areas below with upper lounges and fitness spaces through shared sightlines. Senior exercise rooms sit along the perimeter behind timber screens and curved glazing, allowing older residents to stay visually connected to activity elsewhere in the building. Learning rooms, music spaces, reading niches, and outdoor exercise terraces extend this arrangement, using proximity and visibility to support informal contact between age groups without collapsing their different spatial needs into a single undifferentiated room.
About Snøhetta
Snøhetta provided architecture and interior architecture for Pavilia Farm Clubhouses in Hong Kong. For the project, the studio conceived a sequence of community spaces connected by movement, nature, and shared programs, integrating buildings, gardens, water, and urban farming.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Landscape designers: Ohtori Consultants Environmental Design Institute
- Client: New World Development Ltd
- Other contributors: Ronald Lu & Partners
- Other contributors: Harold de Puymorin / HDP Photography
