EAST Apartments

Architecture & Design

EAST Apartments occupies 23 Tong Chong Street in Taikoo Place, the business district built up over the past four decades on the northern side of King’s Road in Quarry Bay — a different address, and a different building, from the EAST Hong Kong hotel across the neighborhood near Cityplaza, despite both properties sharing the EAST name. The building was known for years simply as Taikoo Place Apartments before Swire Hotels folded it into the EAST brand as EAST Residences in 2019, aligning its identity with the adjacent hotel’s design language without merging the two operations. It holds 106 furnished apartments across saleable areas of roughly 340 to 1,140 square feet, a spread wide enough to run from compact studios through one- and two-bedroom suites up to a penthouse — considerably more configuration variety than a standard hotel floor plan, reflecting the fact that this is long-stay residential product rather than transient hotel inventory. Leases run for a minimum of one month, positioning the building for relocating executives, project teams, and anyone needing furnished housing in Island East for longer than a hotel stay makes financial sense but shorter than a standard Hong Kong tenancy term.

Interiors follow the same design vocabulary Swire Hotels has used across its EAST and Upper House properties — restrained material palettes, floor-to-ceiling glazing, and a preference for warm timber over the marble-and-gilt finish that still dominates much of Hong Kong’s luxury hospitality market. Units come fully furnished and serviced, with residents drawing on the building’s own amenity floor — a 24-hour gym, a lounge, a reading area, and a landscaped terrace overlooking the Taikoo Place neighbourhood — rather than the shared communal spaces a co-living operator like Dash Living offers a few kilometers away on Hong Kong Island’s western side. Serviced apartment and co-living sit at different points on the same furnished-housing spectrum that has grown across Hong Kong as flexible-term demand has increased.

History & Context

Taikoo Place and Taikoo Shing — the neighboring estate where Cityplaza and the EAST Hong Kong hotel sit — both trace back to the same 19th-century Swire enterprise, but they aren’t the same site and shouldn’t be treated as interchangeable despite the shared name and shared corner of the island. John Samuel Swire established the Taikoo Sugar Refinery at Quarry Bay in 1881, with operations beginning in 1884; by the 1920s it had grown into the largest single-unit sugar refinery in the world. Surplus land at the same site led Swire to add the Taikoo Dockyard in 1900–01, building and repairing ships for the China Navigation Company, and the combined refinery-and-dockyard complex functioned as a nearly self-contained company town for its workforce, with its own housing, clinic, school, and recreation ground. Taikoo Primary School, founded to serve dockyard workers’ children, still operates today as a direct link to that era.

Both the refinery and the dockyard closed by the mid-20th century as Hong Kong’s industrial base shifted, and Swire redeveloped the land in phases from the 1970s onward — Taikoo Shing rose first as a large private housing estate anchored by Cityplaza, while Taikoo Place developed later, from the 1980s through the 2000s, as an office-led business park along King’s Road and Tong Chong Street. EAST Apartments sits within that second phase of development, on land with no direct connection to either the sugar refinery or the dockyard operations a century earlier — it is a contemporary Swire office-park asset, not a repurposed industrial building.

Practical Information

Tai Koo MTR Station on the Island Line is the nearest stop, close enough on foot to serve both Taikoo Place and Taikoo Shing without requiring a taxi or bus connection for most residents, with a ride to Central taking roughly fifteen minutes. Tong Chong Street itself has become one of Island East’s more concentrated dining strips over the past decade, its ground-floor units running from casual noodle counters to the kind of mid-range international restaurants that cater to the office workers filling Taikoo Place’s towers on weekdays. ArtisTree, Swire’s arts and events venue, sits within the same development and has hosted exhibitions and performances aimed at drawing evening and weekend foot traffic into what is otherwise a Monday-to-Friday business district.

For daily provisions and larger-scale retail, Cityplaza — one of Hong Kong Island’s largest shopping malls — is a short walk south into Taikoo Shing, alongside the wet-market stalls and cha chaan tengs that still operate in the older residential blocks surrounding it. Residents of EAST Apartments sit at the seam between these two Swire-built environments: the office-park quiet of Taikoo Place on one side, the denser, older residential fabric of Taikoo Shing on the other.

Taikoo Place’s environmental record is more substantial than the usual developer sustainability language. By the end of 2025, every office tower in the district had achieved Platinum-tier certification across BEAM Plus, LEED, WELL, and WiredScore, and in 2024 the district became the first in Hong Kong — and the first in the Greater Bay Area — to earn LEED v4.1 Platinum for Communities: Existing. Rooftop solar panels now sit atop several towers, including One and Two Taikoo Place, Dorset House, and Devon House, and Swire has planted more than 260 native and exotic species across landscaped decks designed as a green corridor linking the district to Quarry Bay Park and Mount Parker for birds, butterflies, and other wildlife. It is a district-wide program rather than something specific to the EAST Apartments building alone, but residents draw on the same infrastructure and certification base as the office towers next door.