Top 10 Tropical Modernist Houses in Vietnam

# Top 10 Tropical Modernist Houses in Vietnam *By TropMod Editorial* --- The house is architecture's most intimate commission. A museum or a railway station must address the public; the house addresses the self. In Vietnam, where the climate demands constant negotiation between shelter and openness, the tropical modernist house has become a crucible for architectural invention. What follows is a selection of ten houses — spanning a decade, the length of the country, and a range of scales and budgets — that collectively define the state of Vietnamese domestic architecture. The list privileges projects that advance the discipline, respond intelligently to climate and context, and reward sustained looking. It is arranged chronologically. --- ## 1. Termitary House **Architect:** Tropical Space (Nguyen Hai Long, Tran Thi Ngu Ngon) **Year:** 2014 **Location:** Da Nang The house that launched a thousand brick facades, the Termitary House remains Tropical Space's most completely realised project — and arguably the defining Vietnamese house of the past decade. Built for a young family on a modest budget in Da Nang's punishing heat, the house takes its name and its cooling strategy from the termite mounds of the African savannah. Its double-skin brick wall — an outer layer of perforated brickwork separated from a solid inner wall by a narrow air gap — creates a natural convection current. Hot air rises and vents through the upper apertures; cooler air is drawn in at ground level. The result is a building that maintains comfortable interior temperatures without mechanical air conditioning, in a city where summer temperatures routinely exceed 38 °C. The formal language is severe: a compact, almost cubic volume with a single articulated elevation. Inside, a double-height living space brings light deep into the plan. A mezzanine bedroom overlooks this central void, and a rooftop terrace provides a planted refuge. The material palette is restricted to clay brick, solid wood, concrete, and bamboo — honest materials, locally sourced, left largely in their natural state. At 140 square metres, the Termitary House proves that climate-responsive architecture need not be the preserve of the wealthy. It can be modest, affordable, and deeply beautiful. --- ## 2. House for Trees **Architect:** VTN Architects (Vo Trong Nghia) **Year:** 2014 **Location:** Ho Chi Minh City If the Termitary House addresses climate through material, the House for Trees addresses it through form. Conceived as a prototypical response to Ho Chi Minh City's catastrophic deficit of green space, the project consists of five concrete volumes — each functioning as a room — arranged around courtyards planted with large tropical trees. The tree canopies rise through the building, visible from every room, and the gaps between volumes act as light wells and ventilation shafts. The result is a house that feels, remarkably, as if it were built around an existing garden rather than a garden inserted into a building. Built for a budget of approximately $156,000 — remarkably modest by the standards of international architectural publishing — the House for Trees is a proof of concept. Nghia's argument is straightforward: if every house in Ho Chi Minh City dedicated even a fraction of its footprint to productive planting, the city's heat island effect could be substantially mitigated. The house has spawned a series — five iterations to date — and its influence on younger Vietnamese practitioners is impossible to overstate. It established the tree as a structural element in the architectural imagination of a generation. --- ## 3. Stepping Park House **Architect:** VTN Architects (Vo Trong Nghia) **Year:** 2018 **Location:** Ho Chi Minh City If the House for Trees internalises the garden, the Stepping Park House externalises it — or, more precisely, extends it. The house is sited adjacent to a public park, and Nghia's parti treats the building as a vertical extension of that green space. A large diagonal void cuts through the centre of the house, rising from the ground-floor living room to the top-floor family room. The void is planted with trees and climbing vegetation, and it serves simultaneously as circulation spine, light well, ventilation chimney, and the primary organisational device of the plan. The ground floor opens completely to the park through glazed sliding doors, dissolving the boundary between domestic interior and public landscape. The brise-soleil facade — a grid of deep concrete fins — filters the strong tropical sun and provides privacy without blocking views. The Stepping Park House is perhaps the most spatially ambitious of VTN's residential works, and it makes a compelling case for a new relationship between the Vietnamese house and the city beyond its walls. Private dwelling need not retreat from public space; it can amplify it. --- ## 4. Louvers House **Architect:** MIA Design Studio **Year:** 2018 **Location:** Thu Duc, Ho Chi Minh City MIA Design Studio's Louvers House represents the tropical modernist house at its most technically refined. Located in the Thu Duc district — one of Saigon's more affluent suburban zones — the house is organised around a series of adjustable vertical louvres that form the primary facade. These louvres, constructed from steel and timber, can be angled to admit or exclude sun, channel or block breezes, and open or close views to the street. The result is a building that behaves less like a fixed object than a responsive organism — a "living shelter", as the architects describe it, that adapts to the diurnal and seasonal rhythms of the tropical climate. Internally, the house is arranged as a sequence of interconnected volumes around courtyards and reflecting pools. The louvre system gives the facade a rhythmic, almost musical quality — solid and void alternating in crisp counterpoint — while the landscaping by the studio integrates native species into every available surface. For a practice more commonly associated with large-scale hospitality and public projects, the Louvers House confirms that MIA's methodology scales down as effectively as it scales up. --- ## 5. Flying Vegetation **Architect:** H&P Architects (Doan Thanh Ha, Tran Ngoc Phuong) **Year:** 2022 **Location:** Hue Flying Vegetation is the most recent and most refined expression of H&P Architects' "Agritecture" thesis. Located in the historic imperial capital of Hue, the house applies a lightweight steel framework to a conventional townhouse facade; suspended from this frame, in vertical succession, are ceramic pots filled with native vegetation. The screen functions as climate moderator, air filter, privacy curtain, and productive garden simultaneously — a breathing, growing, edible facade that transforms the quotidian townhouse into a living laboratory. Materially, the project is grounded in clay, steel, and planting. The architecture operates through layers rather than walls, dissolving the binary distinction between interior and landscape. The photographs by Le Minh Hoang capture the house in its full seasonal behaviour — sometimes dense and opaque with growth, sometimes skeletal and transparent when the vegetation is trimmed back. Flying Vegetation suggests that the future of sustainable architecture in Vietnam may lie not in high-tech systems but in the reanimation of the oldest building technologies of all: soil, seed, water, and light. --- ## 6. Tropical Flow **Architect:** H&P Architects (Doan Thanh Ha, Tran Ngoc Phuong) **Year:** 2023 **Location:** Dong Anh, Hanoi Tropical Flow extends the logic of Flying Vegetation from the facade to the entire site. Located in Vinh Ngoc commune, on the outskirts of Hanoi, the house occupies a plot closely connected to the water surface of Phuong Trach Lake and the surrounding agricultural landscape. H&P Architects have treated the dwelling not as a discrete object but as a node within a larger ecological field — the house, its gardens, its aquaculture pond, and the lake beyond forming a single continuous system. The plan is organised around a series of stepped terraces that descend towards the water, each level hosting different plant species and different domestic functions. Natural ventilation is achieved through carefully calibrated openings at multiple heights, creating stack effects that draw air through the building. The material palette is emphatically local — bamboo, laterite, terracotta, and thatch — and the construction was carried out by craftsmen from the surrounding villages. In an architectural culture increasingly defined by urban density, Tropical Flow is a reminder that the countryside remains a vital site of experiment. --- ## 7. Tam Dao Retreat House **Architect:** Idee Architects **Year:** 2023 **Location:** Tam Dao, Vinh Phuc Province Tam Dao, a hill station established by the French in the early twentieth century, occupies a peculiar microclimate — perpetually cool, frequently misted, cloaked in pine forest — that makes it anomalous within Vietnam's generally torrid geography. Idee Architects' retreat house, set on a 2,000-square-metre hillside plot, responds to this condition with a lightness and transparency rarely encountered in Vietnamese domestic architecture. The house is composed of a series of pavilions distributed across the slope, connected by elevated walkways and oriented to capture views of the valley below. Large expanses of glass are shaded by deep roof overhangs; the mature pine trees on the site were preserved throughout construction. The material language — exposed concrete, blackened steel, and timber — is deliberately restrained, allowing the forest and the mist to dominate the sensory experience. The house is a retreat in the deepest sense: a place of withdrawal that does not so much occupy the landscape as participate in it. --- ## 8. Ben Tre Bungalow **Architect:** VTN Architects (Vo Trong Nghia) **Year:** 2021 **Location:** Ben Tre, Mekong Delta Ben Tre province, in the heart of the Mekong Delta, is one of the most climate-vulnerable regions in Vietnam — low-lying, flood-prone, and heavily dependent on coconut agriculture. VTN's bungalow, a 430-square-metre structure housing three bedrooms and a shared living space, adapts the firm's bamboo-and-thatch language to a residential programme with notable success. The bungalow is raised on stilts — a traditional Delta typology that provides flood protection and under-floor ventilation — and roofed with a deep overhanging thatch that shades the walls completely from direct sun. The plan is open and loose, organised around a central living pavilion that can be entirely opened to the surrounding gardens. Bamboo screens provide privacy without enclosure. The photographs by Hiroyuki Oki capture the building at golden hour, its thatch glowing like embers — an image of rustic luxury that is simultaneously entirely Vietnamese and utterly contemporary. --- ## 9. Bong's House **Architect:** 23o5Studio (Ngo Viet Khanh Duy) **Year:** 2024 **Location:** Ho Chi Minh City Not every significant house is built from scratch. Bong's House — a comprehensive renovation and reconfiguration of a residence constructed in the early 2000s — demonstrates that the restoration and transformation of existing building stock is as fertile a field for architectural invention as the greenfield site. 23o5Studio stripped the house to its structural frame and rebuilt the interior as a series of layered spaces defined by light, planting, and material contrast. A new facade of concrete, glass, and climbing plants transforms the street presence of a building that previously contributed only banality to its neighbourhood. The interior is organised around a central courtyard that brings light, air, and vegetation deep into the plan. The project is a quiet argument for retention over demolition, adaptation over replacement — an argument that Vietnam's rapidly developing cities urgently need to hear. --- ## 10. KeGa Villa **Architect:** T3 Architects **Year:** 2025 **Location:** Ke Ga, Binh Thuan Province Situated between the sea and a national park on Vietnam's south-central coast, KeGa Villa is the most recent project on this list and a compelling indication of where Vietnamese tropical modernism is heading at the upper end of the market. T3 Architects — a French-Vietnamese practice with offices in Ho Chi Minh City and Paris — have designed the villa as a weekend retreat organised around a central courtyard that channels prevailing sea breezes through every living space. A deep overhanging roof — its profile recalling the vernacular dwellings of the region — shades the courtyard and the interior from direct sun, while a series of sliding timber screens allows the building to be completely opened to the landscape or securely closed. The materials are local stone, reclaimed timber, and rammed earth, finished with a precision that speaks to both the architectural ambition of the project and the skill of the craftsmen who executed it. Photographs by Hiroyuki Oki capture the villa in its full dialogue with the coastal landscape — a building that feels, in the best possible sense, inevitable on its site. --- ## Patterns and Prospects A decade of Vietnamese houses reveals certain persistent themes. The perforated facade — whether in brick, concrete, timber, or planted screen — has become the signature move of the Vietnamese tropical modernist house, a low-tech response to the fundamental challenge of admitting light and air while excluding heat and glare. The void — the courtyard, the light well, the double-height space, the diagonal cut through the section — is the primary organisational device, bringing nature into the heart of the plan. And the tree — planted, trained, and accommodated as a structural element of the architecture — has been elevated from decoration to organising principle. These are not merely stylistic tics. They are strategic responses to the specific conditions of Vietnamese domesticity: the narrow plot, the tropical sun, the monsoon rain, the need for cross-ventilation, the cultural expectation that a house should maintain connection to the ground despite vertical extension. The ten houses profiled above — from the austerity of the Termitary House to the refinement of KeGa Villa — constitute a collective argument that the house, in Vietnam, remains the most productive site for architectural thinking. In a discipline that often privileges the monumental over the domestic, they are a reminder that the small can be profound. --- *TropMod Editorial, May 2026*