Kornhill Apartments

It's an older place, but it has been maintained well. The rooms are bright and clean, and the location is very convenient. You might also get a pretty nice view, depending on your floor.

Kornhill Service Apartments are okay and feel much like staying in a hotel, though the Kornhill apartments are a big step down from Taikoo Shing apartments. There's a supermarket on the ground floor, plus two floors of Aeon department stores connected to Kornhill Plaza, where there are various shops and restaurants. Interior walkways also connect to Taikoo MTR station and Taikoo Cityplaza, which is especially useful during a tropical storm warning.

The AEON shopping mall is directly below the apartments, which is very convenient. I haven't stayed in one myself, but I got a chance to look around the rooms and appliances. They seem quite decent for a family, or as a studio for one person. Just know that only some apartments have a kitchen for cooking. If yours doesn't, you'd probably need to order from Food Panda or another delivery service. There's a smoke detector, so bringing in an electric cooker or frying pan would mean taking that risk.

We spent two months in two of the older studio apartments with kitchens. The family liked the place despite the problems, and we'd recommend it. For a 400sf studio with a kitchen, the price was fair. It's very convenient too: above Tai Koo MTR and the three-story Jusco department store and supermarket, with lots of buses, restaurants and shops, cheaper wet and outdoor markets, and a big oceanfront park nearby at MTR D1 exit. Management was polite and quick to help when needed. There were some real issues. We saw a couple of cockroaches in the first weeks. We hadn't complained yet when they did pest extermination on our floor, possibly the whole building, so someone else may have alerted management. Both the bathroom and kitchen sinks drained slowly. That shouldn't be hard to fix, but nothing was done in either of our units, perhaps to encourage guests to take the much more expensive renovated units. The fire exit stairs were locked. There's a sprinkler in each room, but it still seems unsafe. We couldn't walk down one floor from 18 to 17 because the stairs were locked. To get from our 17th-floor unit to the laundry room on 21, we had to take the lift to ground, cross to the other side, then take another lift, and reverse the route on the way back. A freight elevator serves every floor, but it's extremely slow. I'm pretty sure locking the stairs goes against fire department regulations. The LCD TVs were extremely dark because both were set to ECO mode. Turning that off and choosing the Standard quality preset made them watchable, though still not bright. Management seems sensitive about power use, yet the AC can be left running 24 hours a day. The main power switch by the door only turns off two little lights and the induction stove. Other electronics plugged into the wall stay on. We were lucky to have quiet neighbors for most of the two months. You can clearly hear people talking in the hallway, which seems normal for an apartment or hotel, but in our last week we got a new neighbor with kids and could hear them talking and playing through the thin walls. Each unit has a WiFi router, but they're pretty bad, so bring your own. Broadband is only 100Mbps, so don't expect miracles, though it was stable enough that we had no trouble playing MMORPG.