Text description provided by the architects. On the morning of the end of 2017, I suddenly received a phone call from a Vietnamese girl in Australia. She is a landscape architect and is currently working for a large Australian landscape design company. She shared that her parents in Vietnam were planning to build a new house for them and her brother to live. Since her parents have been building the house many times but they have never felt satisfactory, this time she wanted to find a good design consultant to design a new home that suits the needs to use and is aesthetically pleasing. Through careful study, she came to us, she liked the way we did through our projects posted on ArchDaily. We exchanged a lot of ideas and had many common points: Everything is really simple, clean, with more areas for green space.
In Vietnam, the planning of the residential area is mostly divided into 5mx20m. Because of the relatively small area, most investors rarely sacrifice the space used for trees and light. But for us, those green spaces are almost mandatory to put on design in all projects. We understand that: Light and trees are extremely important to each of us. Despite the small area, we always try to persuade the investors to apply to their project. In this project, we designed quite simple.
1st floor: The first space before entering the house is a welcoming hall and also a small motorbike garage, after the door is the living room, and then the kitchen and dining room. One bedroom is located at the end and is separated from the kitchen and dining room by a small garden. This garden has created the wind and light for all space of the 1st floor and is also the space for reading books and relaxing of the family.
2nd floor: We spend most of the space on the 2nd floor as the common living area, reading room, and worship room. In Vietnamese culture, these spaces are extremely important. The remaining area is one bedroom and toilet. All these spaces are directed towards the green space of the small garden between the house.
In the design and construction process, the most difficult for us and her is to convince her father. Her father is quite conservative with views of old building thinking, while our ideas are quite new to him. We had to work together to persuade him many issues during the construction process. Many times, he was very upset because, in his view, we were designers but interfered so much in the house he would later be staying with. However, we remained persistent in persuading and calming his stress. And as far as the end of the project, when the house began to show, as he shared: he gradually got a different view of the project as well as about us. He said there were some things he was not satisfied but if he continued to build another house later, he would still find us.
When completing this project, she was from Australia to Vietnam to be able to, by herself, choose the furniture as well as build the indoor plants. Because her expertise is the landscape architect, so it can say that: She is also an important contributor to this project. We feel very pleased about the cooperation as well as the results of this project.
