The Son’s House: Hong Kong’s Plexes

Ding uk in Kam Sham Village, Tai Po

I never thought I’d find a triplex in Hong Kong but it turns out there’s thousands of them. While Montreal’s triplexes were mostly built in the early twentieth century, though, the ones in Hong Kong, known in Cantonese as ding uk, are actually fairly recent.

While ding uk are usually called “village houses” in English, this isn’t a very precise translation: the term actually means “sons’ houses.” They’re a product of a 1972 law that allows the first-born sons of Hong Kong’s indigenous families to build a house in their ancestral villages without having to pay for the land. There are hundreds of such villages in the New Territories of Hong Kong, which were granted special rights, including a certain degree of self-determination, when they were annexed by Britain in 1898. In order to regulate the demand for housing, the law limited ding uk to three stories in height and 2,100 square feet of floor space.

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Hobbit Houses

I’ve always been curious about the flat-roofed one-storey houses that are sprinkled throughout many of Montreal’s neighbourhoods. Rather than traditional bungalows, they look more like growth-stunted plexes that are missing their upper floors. Last Friday’s Montreal Gazette featured a nice feature by Susan Semenak on the houses, looking both at their history and their current popularity with home buyers looking for an in-town single-family house. I never realized they had a name: shoebox houses. (It’s cute, but I prefer “hobbit houses,” which is what one Urbanphoto commenter called them.)

Most shoebox houses are found in neighbourhoods like Verdun, lower NDG, Villeray and Ahuntsic, which were opened to development with the spread of Montreal’s electric tramway. They appealed mainly to working-class families that couldn’t afford to build proper duplexes or triplexes but still wanted a house of their own. According to David Hanna, an urban studies professor at UQAM and Montreal’s plex expert, they could be built for as little at $500 if family members helped with construction. (That’s about $9,500 in today’s money, according to the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator.) The houses were designed to be expandable, so that a second storey could be eventually be added, a piecemeal process similar to the way houses are built in many of the world’s developing countries.

As in the rest of Canada, that kind of independent house construction has vanished in Montreal, as land and construction prices soared and the house-building trade became dominated by professional real estate developers. And even though shoebox houses might be enjoying a resurgence in popularity, they’re also being knocked down for new condominium developments, a trend documented by Guillaume St-Jean on Spacing Montreal and in his series of then-and-now photos. My feelings about this are mixed: on one hand, densification is a natural, desirable trend, but on the other, we’re losing an historically important type of house that remains an affordable entry into homeownership.

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One-Storey Houses

Montreal developed as a geographically disparate patchwork of independent municipalities. Many of these old towns and suburbs were long ago absorbed into the city, but traces of their past character can still be seen in their streets.

Last week, Guillaume St-Jean wrote on Spacing Montreal about three one-storey buildings in Villeray that will be demolished for condos. Clad in brick, these kinds of flat-roofed brick houses were built mostly in the 1910s and 1920s in the neighbourhoods north of the CPR tracks, like Little Italy, Park Ex, Villeray and Youville (an old village in what is now northern Villeray and southern Ahuntsic). I’ve always found them funny because they look like triplexes missing their top floors.

In the east end, it’s not unusual to find another type of one-storey building: old woodframe cottages, many of them set well back from the street in contrast to the plexes that surround them. That’s the case on Joliette Street in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, where I spotted the two houses above. According to the city’s property bank, the green house was built in 1910. You wouldn’t know it from the vinyl siding.

I’m curious to know who built these houses and why. Were they too poor to invest in a full-fledged duplex or triplex, which were far more lucrative? Did they simply predate the mass development of plexes?

They Work On So Many Levels

Classic turn-of-the-century triplexes on St. Urbain Street

In Montreal, it’s hard to avoid plexes. Found in almost every neighbourhood, they define the landscape and have made this city what it is today, architecturally, culturally and socially. With their distinct form—several superposed flats, each extending from the front of a building to the back—plexes are a popular form of housing, adaptable to many different lifestyles. But what’s their story? How did Montreal come to be a city of walkup apartments, outdoor staircases and balconies?

According to David Hanna, professor of geography at the Université du Québec à Montréal, the origins of the plex can be traced to a nineteenth century “marriage of convenience” between French and Scottish traditions. Historically, some French-Canadian settlers used outdoor staircases to link the first and second floors of their houses; immigrants from Scotland, meanwhile, brought with them the custom of stacking one flat on top of another. “It kept morphing in the nineteenth century until it settled into the form of an outdoor staircase leading to each apartment,” said Hanna.

Architect Susan Bronson, who teaches at the Université de Montréal, notes that turn-of-the-century building codes, designed to improve living conditions, played a big role in reinforcing the dominance of the plex. In Montreal and the suburb of St. Louis (now Mile End), lot sizes were increased from 20 by 60 feet to 25 by 100 feet and laneways were built in between blocks to service new apartments. Setbacks were mandated on newly-built residential streets, indirectly encouraging the use of outdoor staircases as a space-saving measure.

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Getting to Know the Plex

There’s a type of urban housing that is more versatile than rowhouses, more human-scaled than apartment buildings and far denser than single-family homes. It’s called the plex—but unless you’ve lived in a select few cities, you’ve probably never heard of it.

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