The Blue House Cluster and Living Heritage

Viva Blue House comprises three tenement buildings: Blue House, Yellow House and Orange House, built between the 1920s and the 1950s. Their distinct colours are a useful way to orient the eye, but their differences are also architectural. Blue House is a four-storey shophouse with projecting balconies. Yellow House, built in the 1920s, has paired three-storey shophouses, shared timber stairs, rear kitchen annexes and Neo-Classical details. Orange House, built in the 1950s on a former timber yard, is a reinforced-concrete tenement with a narrow street façade and a large exposed side wall.

The cluster preserves the practical features of urban housing. Timber stairs connect upper flats; kitchen annexes sit behind Yellow House; verandahs and balconies extend living space toward the street. Blue House’s ownership was surrendered to the government in 1978, when its exterior was painted blue. Together, the buildings show how Wan Chai’s domestic landscape changed across decades, from early shophouse forms to the functional tenement. This is heritage at household scale: the architecture records how residents entered, cooked, looked out and shared the narrow spaces between home and street.

Revitalised as Viva Blue House under the Development Bureau’s partnership scheme, the cluster retains its residential purpose. It also hosts community and cultural activities, including workshops and guided tours at Hong Kong House of Stories. The result is neither a closed museum nor a purely commercial conversion. Homes remain part of the site while public programmes create reasons for visitors to enter its story. The project received an Award of Excellence in the 2017 UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation. Its most compelling feature, however, is the combination of inhabited buildings and shared cultural use: conservation remains tied to the place’s urban life.