Rachel stands in the middle of a showroom in Tai Koo and she runs her hand over a slab of sintered stone that costs more than her first car and she is not thinking about the stir-fry she will cook or the coffee she will spill.

She is thinking about a Friday in November when her mother-in-law will walk through the door and look at the new counters and either nod with a thin smile or say nothing at all.

Her husband leans against a display of cabinets and he looks at his phone and he thinks about the budget but he does not see the invisible lines of social debt that Rachel is trying to settle.

This is how a home begins in Hong Kong and it is rarely about the people who sleep there and it is almost always about the people who visit for an hour. We build stages instead of shelters and we spend the money on the parts that face the audience and we starve the parts that actually hold us up at night.

There is a strange math to how we choose to live and it often involves a lie we tell to the neighbors or the boss or the parents who gave us the deposit.

Some of us perform a deep and dusty frugality in public while we hide a life of soft silk and expensive wine behind a plain steel door. We want the world to think we are struggling so they do not ask for help or judge our luck.

The Acting Interior

Others do the opposite and they put every cent into the marble in the foyer and the gold trim on the TV wall while they eat instant noodles over a plastic bin in a bedroom that has no light. Both of these lives are a kind of acting and both of them lead to a house that does not fit the body of the person inside it.

“He told me once that the secret to a window that lasts is not the colored glass but the lead that holds it together and the lead is grey and dull and ugly to look at.”

– Liam F., stained glass conservator

Liam spent his days taking apart windows that were hundreds of years old. If you spend all your money on the red and the blue glass and you use cheap lead then the window will bow and crack and fall into the street when the first big wind hits. He saw the back of the art and he knew that the structure is where the truth lives.

In the world of 裝修 the lead is the plywood and the hinges and the way the cabinets are bolted to the wall but most people want to talk about the glass. They want to talk about the colors and the shine.

This is a tax we pay to the ego and it is a heavy one because it leaves us with beautiful rooms that make us feel tired.

The 480 Square Foot Battleground

The flat in Tai Koo is about 480 square feet and every inch of it is a battleground between what Rachel wants and what Rachel thinks she should have. She wants a place where she can kick off her shoes and not worry about the scuff marks but she feels she must have a floor that looks like a gallery.

She wants a wardrobe that can hold all the mess of a real life but she is looking at open shelving because she saw it on a screen and it looked like success. The open shelf is a trap for a busy person and it demands a constant tidiness that no one can keep up but it tells a story of a life that is under control.

When you walk into a home you can feel the weight of the performance and you can see it in the way the furniture is placed. If the sofa faces the TV it is a room for the family and if the chairs face each other it is a room for a conversation that might never happen.

In Hong Kong we often do not have the space for a guest room so we turn the whole living area into a guest room and we live in the margins of our own property. We buy the heavy table that seats six and we use it once a year and for the other 364 days we walk around it and we bruise our hips on the corners.

The real tragedy of the performed home is that it ignores the specific needs of the people who pay the mortgage. A husband might need a desk for his work but he gets a small stool in the corner because a desk would ruin the flow of the room for the guests.

A child might need a place for a hundred plastic blocks but they get a sleek box that is hard to open because the box matches the curtains.

Furniture as Therapy

Hohome sees this happen every day when people come in with drawings they found online and they want to fit a palace into a studio. The designers have to be like therapists and they have to ask why the client wants a kitchen island when they do not cook or why they want a platform bed that is too high for their knees.

The heritage of making furniture for fifty years teaches you that a chair is for sitting and a cupboard is for hiding things and if they do not do those jobs then they are just expensive wood taking up air.

The 100% completion guarantee that the company offers is a strange thing to have to promise but it speaks to the fear that sits at the heart of every renovation in this city. People are afraid that the stage will never be finished and that the curtain will never rise and they will be left standing in a shell of a home with no money left.

They are so focused on the ending that they do not think about the middle and they do not think about how the E0 plywood will keep the air clean for their kids. They just want the worktop to be right.

Rachel eventually touches the cheaper worktop and she looks at her husband and she sees that he is tired too. They have been walking through these shops for three weekends and they have argued about shades of white and types of handles and they have forgotten why they bought the flat in the first place.

They bought it so they could be together and they could start a life that felt like theirs. The performance is a debt that never gets paid off because the audience is always changing and the mother-in-law will find something else to talk about and the neighbors will buy a better stone next year.

If you build for the way you actually drink your tea in the morning and the way you throw your keys on the side when you are exhausted then you win because the house starts to work for you.

We should look at our homes the way Liam F. looked at his windows and we should care about the lead as much as the glass. The hidden parts are the ones that carry the weight of the years.

I think about that Tai Koo showroom often and I think about the thousands of people who are standing over samples of wood and stone right now. I hope they choose the one that feels good under their hand when no one is watching.

I hope they spend the extra money on the hinges that do not squeak and the boards that do not off-gas and the storage that actually swallows the clutter.

A home is a place where you should be allowed to be a mess and it is the one place where you should not have to act. If the mother-in-law does not like the counter then she can go home to her own kitchen and she can live with her own choices.

Rachel finally lets go of the expensive stone and she points to the one that is durable and simple and she says this one will do and it will leave us enough for the good mattress. Her husband smiles and he puts his phone away and for the first time in a month they are not talking to an audience they are just talking to each other.