Archisteem 20: Friendly Architecture Curation - Office + House in Vietnam

Today's curated project: Phong House – Office + House

Today’s sharing is a fusion of office and house in a terrace unit. This also reflects a kind of “shop house” that I previously wrote about back in my hometown, Penang. Most of the time, the shop should be at the ground level, welcoming the customers. For this case, it is a consultancy service company, so it should be more secluded and the office was located on 1st floor.

This project is led by VHL Architecture Co. Ltd took place in Hòa Xuân, Vietnam. The project covered an approximate 100m² of 2 stories terrace house and was completed this year. The project is a renovation work of an old furniture factory into a house + office concept building for the architecture firm itself.

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This is a relatively new project published on Archdaily which I loved due to its space planning and the design elements. The architect is conscious about the image the old building had in the local context and maintained that as well.

To earn good money, the young generation of Vietnam moved to the urban area. However, the living cost is expensive and it is impossible for any young ones without good financial support to afford a house. Thus, the company renovated this old factory with prefabricated masonry on the existing structure. The whole idea is to make the project a low budget yet recreate the local culture of living in proximity to nature.

Creating space, raising the living – raising the values of Vietnam

This is the philosophy of the architecture firm. I agree with the statement that architects have the responsibility to help people to create livable spaces and raise the quality of life. It is the reason why I created #archisteem community as well, which is to raise awareness to more people about creating more livable and sustainable place for our future. In practice, speed and cost are two important factors that will affect the overall design. An experienced and sensible architect will be able to balance space quality, flexibility, and cost efficiency within the proposal. This has to come with years of training and experience. As of now, I am also struggling to pick up as much as possible to make better and matured design.

Talking about the spatial arrangement for the new building, it combines garden, office, and home under one roof. Thus, the staffs can work and rest at the same place. Most importantly, the house is designed to be open and porous, that gives the sense of freedom and connection to the outside world, reducing the stress level for the occupants.

The planning is cleverly done as the architect put public spaces like the kitchen, living room, dining room on the ground floor. This level will have a lot of movement and disturbance which we do not want during our working time. Moving the office on the first level, and create a relaxing space just beside the office is one great idea. After long hours of facing the screen, the staffs can get out and take a rest on the balcony surrounded by green crawling and hanging on the framed steel mesh.

This could be a good home office design to set up around a sub-urban area which my country does have this kind of long and double stories terraces.

What do you think if you get to work in such an environment? Do you like it?

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Source of images used and reference article. Click here

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Hope you enjoy the curation. If you have any projects that you wished to be curated, do drop a comment to me. Any critics and suggestions about my curation are welcome!

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This is an #archisteem post.

A new tag that is to curate our existing built environment and also future built environment development. Want to know more? Read here.

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Animation By @zord189

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Find me at @kimzwarch