A village house is a different animal
Village house renovation (村屋裝修) is not a bigger flat renovation, it is a different kind of project. A New Territories village house is a vertical home, usually around three storeys linked by staircases, often with a roof and sometimes a garden. That means more area, more trades and more coordination than a same-household tower flat, and it moves two things to the top of the brief that a flat owner never thinks about: waterproofing and drainage, and the fact that no management company supplies anything. Get those foundations right and the rest is design. Skip them and finished work gets undone from the outside in.
Waterproofing and drainage are foundations, not finishes
This is the sentence to remember: in a village house, waterproofing and drainage belong in the foundations of the brief, not among the finishes. A village house has far more external surface than a tower flat, a roof, multiple exposed walls, an envelope taking Hong Kong’s heavy rain from every direction, which simply means more places for water to get in. And water damage undoes finished work: a leak found after the flooring, plaster and joinery are in is a demolition problem, not a touch-up. Scope the roof, the external envelope and the drainage first, before a single decorative decision, and treat them as structural commitments rather than line items to trim.
No building-wide managed services
In a tower flat, water pressure, drainage, refuse and building maintenance are all handled by a management company. A village house has none of that, you are the building. Before design, that means checking, floor by floor: is the water pressure and supply adequate on the upper storeys; do the drainage connections run cleanly away; is the electrical capacity enough for how the house will actually be used across three levels. These are start-of-project surveys, not mid-job surprises. Discovering weak upstairs pressure or an undersized supply after the walls are closed is exactly the kind of avoidable cost a proper survey removes.
Rebuilding uses a Certificate of Exemption
The approvals path for a village house is genuinely different, and people get this wrong by assuming it mirrors a flat. Rebuilding a New Territories village house typically proceeds under a Certificate of Exemption from the District Lands Office, within the exempted size limits, not a Buildings Department approval as an ordinary building would need. Internal refurbishment, by contrast, may need no approval at all. The point is to establish which path your works fall on before you design, because a layout that assumes the wrong route can be undeliverable.
When you need an Authorised Person
Depth of works decides the professionals. Where the renovation affects structure, altering the frame, opening a slab, changing the load path, an Authorised Person (AP) is required, and structural work brings a Registered Structural Engineer into the picture too. Cosmetic internal refurbishment inside the existing structure generally does not. The honest move, as with any Hong Kong home, is to confirm at the site survey what is structural and what is not, so the AP is engaged when genuinely needed and the programme is built around real approvals rather than optimistic ones.
The multi-floor coordination premium
Three storeys is three of many things: potentially an extra riser, services routed vertically, staircases that eat floor area and dictate circulation, trades working across levels who must be sequenced so one floor’s work doesn’t trap another’s. This vertical coordination is real work, and it is why a village house costs more and takes longer than a flat of comparable total area. Phasing by floor keeps a large, multi-level job legible, but it has to be planned deliberately, not improvised on site.
Budgeting for the envelope first
Because the envelope and services carry the risk, that is where the budget discipline goes. The failure mode is spending on visible finishes while under-scoping roof waterproofing, drainage and cross-floor services, then paying twice when water finds the gap. Fund the foundations first: roof and external waterproofing, drainage, water pressure and electrical capacity across all floors, and the AP where structure is touched. Renovation insurance and a properly licensed, insured contractor matter more here than in a managed building, because in a village house there is no management company standing behind the works.
How Primeworks handles this
We scope a village house from the envelope inwards, roof, external waterproofing, drainage, and water and electrical capacity across every floor, before any decorative work is drawn, because these are the things that undo a finished home if they’re missed. We confirm the approvals route early (a District Lands Office Certificate of Exemption for a rebuild, an AP where structure is affected) so the design matches what’s actually permissible. And because we carry design and build under one accountable team, the vertical coordination across three storeys sits with the same people who drew it, on a transparent, staged payment schedule tied to real on-site progress.