REPORTING BY Andrew Spires PHOTOS BY Andrew Spires & Josef Raasch
Out on a junk trip, speeding by Yi Long Wan on the Chi Ma Wan Peninsula, you may have spotted Sea Ranch’s gleaming white towers and wondered who lives there – and how they get about. There’s clearly no road access, or public ferry, so does their day start and end with a hike to Pui O?
As it turns out, the 40+ residents who remain at Sea Ranch make use of a private ferry to and from Cheung Chau; still quite a schlep if you suddenly find yourself out of milk. But accessibility isn’t a plus for everyone – even everyone in Hong Kong. The real sense of isolation is what must have brought the party people to buy here back in the 70s and 80s. (A swish weekend retreat for senior executives completed in 1979, Sea Ranch was a kind of Eyes Wide Shut, secret handshake of a development that only those in the know, knew.) And arguably Sea Ranch’s inaccessibility is still the lure – that, and the price. A 1,240-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment, with a large balcony and beautiful sea view, comes in at around HK$4.9 million.
Designed as a HK$40 million utopian pocket of seclusion, with 200 five-star apartments, Sea Ranch sold well at the start but within a short while there was trouble in paradise. The original developer Hutchison Whampoa got into serious debt and sold the holding company Holiday Resorts to apartment owners for HK$1 in 1983. There was further disruption in 1996, when a group of residents parted ways with Holiday Resorts and formed a new committee named Incorporated Owners, which now holds majority control.
The closure of all of the original lures, including the helipad, clubhouse, swimming pool, a buzzing cocktail lounge replete with full-size snooker table, saunas and a children’s nursery, was inevitable. The man-made beach is still there, but everything else has been covered with tarpaulins or chained up. Sea Ranch is now inhabited by a quiet bunch of retirees and reclusive/ artistic types – and people who get to work from home. The main staircase up to the resort has long been washed away by the sea but the rest of the development looks in remarkably good order. The few remaining residents clearly care about their hideaway. It’s cheap, underpopulated and by the sea. What’s not to like?
