Camlux Hotel

Architecture & Design

Camlux Hotel occupies 15 Wang Kwong Road in Kowloon Bay, inside a six-storey concrete-frame structure built in 1986 as Camel House, a manufacturing plant for Camel-brand vacuum flasks — the metal-and-glass thermoses once found in nearly every Hong Kong household and workplace canteen. Flask production at the site ended in 2013, and the building was converted under the government’s industrial building revitalization scheme, which allows ageing factory blocks to be repurposed for hotel, office, or commercial use without full demolition; Camlux opened around 2016–2017 as the first hotel of its kind in Kowloon Bay to come out of that policy. Because the original floor plates were built for machinery and storage rather than guest circulation, the renovation team cut two internal courtyards through the existing shell to bring daylight and ventilation to the additional rooms created inside — a structural workaround required to meet fire-safety and building-code standards for hotel occupancy inside a converted industrial envelope. The finished interiors keep the factory’s memory visible rather than erasing it: vacuum flasks from the original production line are set into the lobby reception desk, and several of the wall lamps throughout the property are built from flask components. The hotel counts 185 rooms across four categories — 103 Cozy, 70 Comfy, 10 Family, and two Studio rooms — ranging from about 22 to 32 square meters. The building’s working life traces the broader arc of Hong Kong manufacturing: Camel House opened in 1986 near the tail end of the territory’s factory era, just as much of the labour-intensive production that had defined Kwun Tong and Kowloon Bay since the 1950s was already relocating across the border into the Pearl River Delta, where land and labour cost a fraction of Hong Kong rates. By the time the flask line finally shut down in 2013, the building had outlasted most of its original industrial neighbors, which is part of why it became a test case for the government’s revitalization policy rather than simply another site cleared for a new tower.

Location & Transit

Kowloon Bay sits at the heart of what was, through the 1960s and 1970s, Hong Kong’s principal manufacturing belt: neighbouring Kwun Tong alone grew from roughly 100 factories and 15,000 workers in 1961 to around 800 factories and 72,000 workers by 1970, producing textiles, plastics, and later electronics for export. Camlux’s own building was part of that same industrial wave. Since 2011, the government’s “Energising Kowloon East” initiative has pushed to convert this belt into a second central business district, and the neighborhood today mixes ageing industrial blocks still in factory use with converted towers now leased as offices, showrooms, and — as with Camlux — hotel rooms. Kowloon Bay MTR Station, on the Kwun Tong Line, is roughly a ten-to-fifteen-minute walk from the hotel via Lin Hing Street, connecting onward to Kwun Tong, Yau Ma Tei, and the cross-harbour interchange at Prince Edward. Within that same radius sit Goldin Financial Centre, the MegaBox shopping mall, the Kowloon Bay International Trade & Exhibition Centre, Amoy Plaza, and Zero Carbon Building — a demonstration structure built by the Construction Industry Council a short distance away as Hong Kong’s first carbon-neutral building. Street-level food in the immediate area still leans toward the neighborhood’s working-class roots rather than the towers rising around it: cha chaan teng counters serving buttered pineapple buns and Hong Kong-style milk tea, and Chiu Chow-style noodle shops that have operated in the district for decades, sit within a few minutes’ walk of the hotel entrance.

Practical Information

Guest rooms are fitted with high-speed Wi-Fi, ergonomic workstations, and rain showers, and the property runs a central courtyard dining venue serving modern Cantonese cuisine alongside a fitness facility. The larger fact worth noting is the building itself: reusing a 1986 concrete factory shell rather than demolishing and rebuilding avoids the embodied carbon cost of new construction — the energy and material already spent pouring that concrete decades ago is not wasted, even if the property does not market itself primarily as a sustainability play. That kind of adaptive reuse is also, in practical terms, an economic story about the district — ageing industrial floor space in Kowloon East has historically leased for a fraction of Hong Kong Island rents, which is part of why hotel operators, offices, and showrooms have been willing to move in as factories vacate.

The wider district has changed further since Camlux opened. A few minutes away by taxi or bus, on the reclaimed runway site of the former Kai Tak Airport, Kai Tak Sports Park opened to the public on 1 March 2025, built around a 50,000-seat main stadium with a retractable roof alongside a smaller indoor arena and a public sports ground — the largest single sports infrastructure project Hong Kong has built, and one more sign of Kowloon East’s shift from factory floor to leisure and event destination within the space of a single generation. For guests with an interest in the building’s own backstory rather than the neighborhood’s, the Camel vacuum flask brand that once operated the factory is still recognizable to older Hong Kong residents, for whom the metal thermos was standard kitchen equipment long before insulated bottles became a design object; the flasks built into the lobby desk and lamps are not props sourced after the fact but leftover stock and fittings from the plant’s own production line.