By Mike Ives, New York Times
HANOI, Vietnam — Soon after Dang Hoang Giang and Vu Chi Mai returned to Vietnam from Austria, they began searching for a house design that would capture their peripatetic sensibilities.
Dang Hoang Giang and Vu Chi Mai on their rooftop garden overlooking the Duong River. Credit François Carlet-Soulages/Noi Pictures
They are Hanoi natives but consider themselves modern nomads, people who are not rooted in their home country and can work anywhere, Mr. Giang said. He spent 20 years in Austria and what was then East Germany, eight of those years with his wife in Vienna, and now has Vietnamese and Austrian citizenship.
The couple spent an additional three years living in downtown Hanoi with Mr. Giang’s parents and in a series of rented apartments. Then, in 2007, they paid 1.2 billion Vietnamese dong, now $57,000, to buy about a tenth of an acre of riverside land on the city’s quasi-rural outskirts.
Mr. Giang told prospective architects he wanted a house that would feel close to nature and rest lightly on the landscape, like a tent.
To find design features they liked, the couple consulted architectural books and studied the designs of hotels and resorts they visited in Thailand and Indonesia. “We wanted it to be modern,” Mr. Giang said. “But it also had to fit into the tropical climate.”
They eventually chose a sketch by Nguyen Chi Kien, a young Vietnamese architect who had just completed his studies in Germany. Mr. Giang and Mr. Kien share an appreciation for Japanese minimalist architecture, particularly the work of Shigeru Ban, the 2014 recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the discipline’s highest honor.
Ms. Mai, an economist, said she had reservations about building beside the Duong River, nearly four miles from the city center, because the move would significantly increase their two daughters’ school commute. She and her husband also knew the site might be prone to flooding.
But Mr. Giang, an activist who works in development, said they went ahead anyway because the pastoral setting was such a contrast to central Hanoi’s traffic and air pollution. He also said it reminded him of the elegiac 1948 poem “On the Other Side of the Duong River,” by the late Vietnamese writer Hoang Cam.
Construction and design costs totaled about 1.4 billion dong, he said, and the process took a year from start to finish. The family moved in during 2008.
The 260-square-meter, or almost 2,800-square-foot, home stands near a copse of bamboo at the end of a small street. It consists of two boxlike structures made of lightweight concrete and linked by a wooden bridge. The interior brick walls are covered with white stucco.
There is a leafy courtyard as well as an intentionally unkempt rooftop garden atop one structure. Large windows allow the area’s brisk cross breezes into the home. And the layout requires everyone to step outside — rain or shine — to move from one unit to the other.
“There is no clear boundary between inside and outside,” Mr. Giang said one recent Sunday at the house, as dusk settled on the Duong. “It’s very fluid.”
The smaller, single-level box has a white exterior and one main room — an open-plan living area and kitchen — flanked by a bathroom. The larger, two-level box, which is pale green, has four bedrooms, a terrace beside the master bedroom and a second-level bathroom with transparent glass walls. Ms. Mai said the inspiration was a bathroom she liked in a Bangkok hotel.
Mr. Giang said he considered the sparsely furnished bedrooms, which have sliding doors and artificial wooden floors, to be multifunctional spaces that are not only for sleeping. He often works in the guest room or kitchen, for example, and the youngest of his two daughters plays wherever she likes. “You can work everywhere and play everywhere,” he said. “It’s a nomadic lifestyle within the house.”
Read the full article by Mike Ives from New York Times.
