HONG KONG

GARY CHANG stood in the middle of his apartment on a recent Saturday morning, ignoring a message from his Nintendo Wii on the wall-size screen: “Are you fidgeting? I can’t seem to analyze you.” He repositioned the game system’s balance board, stepped on for a second run of downhill skiing and began to shift from side to side, a computer-generated figure swishing in time with him across the room.

Soon enough, having worked up an appetite, he was ready to move on. He used a remote control to raise the screen, revealing a large yellow-tinted window behind it, filling the room with radiance. “Like sunshine,” Mr. Chang said, though the colorized gray daylight made the view  a forest of apartment towers in Hong Kong’s bustling working-class Sai Wan Ho district  look dusky, like an old sepia print.

He grabbed a handle near the wall-mounted television, pulling a section of the wall itself toward the center of the room. Behind it, a small countertop with two burners, a sink and a spice rack appeared. Opposite the countertop, on the back of the now-displaced wall, he lowered a hinged worktop made of a lightweight laminate of honeycombed aluminum. Suddenly, he was standing in a kitchen.

Image A floor plan of the dining area.

This room  the “maximum kitchen,” he calls it  and the “video game room” he was sitting in minutes before are just 2 of at least 24 different layouts that Mr. Chang, an architect, can impose on his 344-square-foot apartment, which he renovated last year. What appears to be an open-plan studio actually contains many rooms, because of sliding wall units, fold-down tables and chairs, and the habitual kinesis of a resident in a small space. As Mr. Chang put it, “I glide around.”