The Continuous Garden
How deeply can a house be linked to its garden? A multi-generational family home in Vietnam by VTN Architects is a continuous circuit of rooms, terraces and vegetation that dissolves typical spatial demarcations and carves a private family oasis.
Fifteen minutes’ drive from central Ho Chi Minh City, the Ha House by VTN Architects (Vo Trong Nghia Architects) inserts a luscious pocket of greenery into a densely packed residential site. The plot of land for this latest addition to the studio’s ‘House for Trees’ series is long and narrow at seven metres wide and twenty metres long. The narrow facade it presents to the street teases the imagination. An interplay of solid horizontal bands of warm terracotta brick walls and vibrant snatches of green foliage suggests a playful stack of spaces, yet without revealing any private areas within.
The horizontality of the terraces on the upper floors is interrupted by diagonal chamfers on the lower levels – formed by a beckoning entrance terrace on the ground floor and a triangular shaded garden buffering the first-storey bedroom from the street.
As with other houses in VTN Architects’ repertoire, the intent is to connect people and nature through deliberate gaps that are filled with plants. With stacking terrace volumes askew from floor to floor, gaps are created that let in generous amounts of daylight and breeze. Gardens planted with a variety of trees and shrubs provide pleasant shade and visual screening from prying eyes. The cleverly designed stepped gardens form a continuous circuit of play spaces for the children up to the top floor via steel staircases — alternately evolving in programmatic flux from quieter gardens accessed from the bedrooms, to communal gathering spaces for the family.
Spatially, being within the house is to be immersed in a lush tropical forest of sorts. Everywhere you turn, carefully placed window openings frame snatches of leafy canopies or open directly into private gardens. Slits in the ceiling for skylights pull daylight deep within the interconnected volumes of the terraces. Despite the modest scale of the house and the closeness of its neighbours on both sides, the urban density fades away. One instead perceives a closeness to the natural world and the presence of the rest of the family, pottering about their daily activities.
Programmatically, the Ha House forms a dynamic scaffold for multi-generational living. The family’s request for a swimming pool, barbecue terrace, living, dining, kitchen, grandmother’s bedroom and generous play spaces for the children on the ground floor was fulfilled, with play terraces dispersed throughout the levels. Floor slabs form folding planes that extend the surface of activity across floors.
Branching off a centrally placed void, the first-storey programs of library and kid’s bedroom are integrally connected to the living spaces on the ground floor. A spa on the second storey opens directly into a relaxing private garden. Ascending the stairs, the roof plane serves as an outdoor kitchen for starry night dinners within a roof garden. Wrapping around and intertwining the functional enclosed spaces, these landscaped terraces form an integral vine that threads the narrative of the home.
As much as the Ha House is a home for its human inhabitants, it is also a home for trees. The architects share the sustainable benefits reaped from this approach to building: dense greening along the facade cuts down direct sunlight, which apart from solving issues of privacy, also reduces the need to use air-conditioning. Brick, a local material used abundantly in Vietnam, is employed in this home both to reduce the carbon footprint and to keep construction costs low.
Over multiple iterations in the ‘House for Trees’ series, VTN Architects reimagine family house typologies in dense urban contexts, and proffer new ways of living intimately with vegetation and the elements. It’s not just the children who are delighted by opportunities for exploration in the imaginatively configured Ha House; the zigzagging terraces surprise us with both the intimacy of shaded nook spaces, and the welcoming warmth of verdant outdoor living rooms.