One of the summer projects we’ve been embarking on is looking into renovating our condo. It's older, some aesthetic upgrades have been done at various points, but a few structural things still give away the age of the building. The popcorn ceiling, to me, is the biggest giveaway.
The ceiling itself is cement, so anything electrical that needs to go up there is a whole conversation.
One of the current issues is lighting. There are almost no fixtures in our ceiling (the above picture is one of the few) and we've been getting by on floor lamps, but not enough of them, so the room is dimmer than I’d like. We could add more, but I've drawn a line at turning our living room into the IKEA floor lamp showroom.
So pot lights it is. Except pot lights require lowering the ceiling by 2-3 inches to run the wiring, since we can't drill into the cement above.
We've been getting quotes from several contractors (because you obviously talk to more than one person before making renovation decisions), and after a few visits, I noticed a pattern. Probably because I'm currently writing a memoir about growing up between two cultures, so I'm more tuned in to these cultural differences than I might be otherwise.
Every non-Chinese contractor who has walked through has told us the same thing: we have plenty of height, 2-3 inches is nothing, go ahead.
Every Chinese contractor who has walked through has told us not to do it, 2-3 inches will make the space feel cramped.
Watching this with each contractor is now as interesting as deciding which one to listen to.
What are they each measuring against
I spent a lot of my childhood in HongKong, and my parents grew up there. Hong Kong is the 4th most densely populated territory in the world. An average dual-middle-income household lives in 500-650sq ft (if you ever want to look for inspiration on how to maximize every sq ft in a home, this is where to look).
Minimum legal ceiling height is 2.5 meters, roughly 8 feet 2 inches. If you grew up in that environment, ceiling height is one of the very few dimensions that has any give in it. The footprint is small, the walls are close, the window is what it is. The feeling of spaciousness lives there, in the vertical air above your head.
Homes in urban mainland China are actually significantly larger than Hong Kong homes. A middle-income urban Chinese household typically lives in around 1,100 square feet, and the national standard for new residential buildings requires ceilings of at least 3 meters, roughly 9 feet 10 inches, meaningfully taller than what's standard in most Canadian condos.
For context, average dual-middle-income household in Toronto lives in 1,000-2,000 square feet
So the Chinese contractor's instinct against a lowered ceiling isn't quite "we're used to being cramped." It's closer to "the standard for what a ceiling should feel like is a lot higher."
Now, I don't know where these contractors grew up. I don't know if they trained in Hong Kong, mainland China, or in Toronto, where they get their inspiration or ideas from (hello, pinterest boards), whose living rooms they've absorbed as the reference for what a good one looks like.
My curious-researcher brain would love to sit them down and ask where their instinct came from, whether they grew up hearing about ceiling height at home, whose spaces they think of when they picture a well-designed room. But that would be a weird interview to conduct in the middle of a renovation quote we may or may not accept.
There's also a feng shui layer that's probably operating somewhere in this, whether or not the contractors would name it. Feng shui is a traditional Chinese practice around how physical spaces affect the flow of energy, health, and wellbeing of the people living in them. It's thousands of years old and still shapes how many Chinese people think about their homes, from where the front door faces to which wall the bed goes against.
The specific concept relevant here isn't "high ceiling good, low ceiling bad." It's about overhead pressure, called 横梁压顶 (héngliáng yādǐng), roughly "a beam pressing down." The belief is that overhead compression, especially directly over where you sleep, sit, eat, or work, disrupts the flow of energy and creates a psychological weight that can wear on your health, mood, and luck over time. Feng shui gives the beliefs a language of flow and pressure; design psychology calls it proportion and visual weight.
Feng shui is embedded in Chinese culture in a way that outsiders often underestimate. Even people who don't practice it consciously grew up hearing bits of it in daily life. The designers Chinese contractors follow, the projects they've admired, the tradespeople they apprenticed under, are likely marinated in it too. The instinct can be present without any awareness of where it came from.
The invisible reference point
Every expert works from a reference point they absorbed somewhere and probably don't notice consciously. It shows up as taste, intuition, judgment, or "I don't know, it just wouldn't feel right." That's how expertise works, most of the time. It also means when someone gives you advice with confidence, the confidence is real and the reference point underneath it is invisible, even to them.
The interesting thing about a renovation quote is you get to hold them up next to each other in a way you rarely can with medical advice or parenting advice or marketing advice.
I still haven't decided about the pot lights. Two more contractors are coming. I'll keep you posted on whether the observation holds up.
A Thought To Carry Forward:
Two people can agree on the measurement and disagree on whether it's enough, because "enough" was learned in different rooms.