Kai Chiu / Pak Sha / Lan Fong Roads [????- ]

These three roads in Causeway Bay have caught my eye recently. This building started me off, with it's pointy corner plot, and curvy windows. Have you noticed it too?

It's on the junction of Lan Fong and Yun Ping roads - that's Times Square in the background. It's always struck me that this building was very neatly finished. Look up, and you notice a little extra attention was given to it, with this type of detail on the rooftop:

Then if you let your eye wander, you suddenly realise that all the buildings along Lan Fong Road share this same detail:

One of the buildings' doors was open, so I took a look inside. The sides of the staircases are made from something like concrete, but given this lovely smooth curve:

Head up a few flights, and the restaurants and shops give way to flats. Thankfully the colour scheme also changes, reverting to the original finish:

Is there a technical name for this type of wall finish? It still looks good after 50+ years - better than the tiled coverings on our 20-year old apartment building.

Most of the building entrances have been remodelled in one way or another, but here's one that shows the original appearance, and the same green finish used in the stairwell:

As I wandered along, I caught a glimpse of these chimney stacks - just for cooking fires I'd guess.

I walked a zig-zag along Lan Fong, Pak Sha, and Kai Chu roads, and was pleasantly surprised to find that all the buildings in these blocks follow the same design. Well, all except #12 Pak Sha Rd. It's still the same height, but for some reason has a different facade.

One other slight difference is that the buildings along Kai Chiu Road are one storey shorter than their companions. Here's one of the shorter buildings on the corner of Kai Chiu & Lee Garden Roads:

Unfortunately, none of the other buildings have been kept as well as the first one we saw. Hoardings and shopfronts cover the original appearance:

What if they were all restored to their original appearance, the same as the 'curvy' building in the first photo? I think it would look a very smart and attractive couple of blocks.

Enough dreaming - what do we know about the history?

Centamap says that all these buildings were first occupied in March 1955, making them 54 years old. I find it unusual to see a relatively large area apparently devloped by a single developer at that time. And also that none have been replaced since by taller buildings.

Does anyone know who they were developed by, and if they are still owned by a single owner today?

These buildings formed the first dense development of this piece of land. As T has already mentioned, the area where the old Mitsukoshi store stood 'used to be the site of the 'Lee Gardens (利園)“ (a sort of amusement park without the machinery run by the same Lee family who later owned the Lee theatre and the Lee Gardens Hotel) which became 500 Hennessy Road in the late 1970's.'

A contour map of the area in the 1930s shows that there used to be a hill here, extending from Hennessy Road to Caroline Road, so it covered the area of the three streets we're looking at. (The map shows a few buildings up on top of the hill, and labels it 'East Point'. Was this the hill where the grand Jardines house once stood?)

On that old map, the route of today's 'Lee Garden Road' can be seen, though at that time it was named 'Two Hill Road'. The modern English name for the road loses any memory of a hill, but it's still there in the Chinese name, '利 園 山 道', which translates directly as 'Lee Garden Hill Road'.

What else do we know about this area?

Regards, David