The clients are a family of five, consisting of parents and three sons. Their desire is to have a house with four bedrooms located in a quiet suburban area, spacious with plenty of greenery, to replace their old house, which is closer to the city center, more cramped, and noisier.

The project is situated on a 6000m² plot of land that was originally the family’s garden, far from the city center and sparsely populated—mainly coffee and mangosteen plantations—in Bảo Lộc City. The actual condition of the site is a gently sloping plot of land with about a 10° incline, offering a fantastic view of the Đồng Nai River and the majestic Đại Bình Mountain in the distance. The environment here is very clean, quiet, and cool, with many existing fruit trees.

The main idea of the project is to meet the basic needs of the clients while also providing artistic values that even exceed their expectations, including:

• Proposing the creation of a structure with a sculptural form that integrates harmoniously with the landscape and nature of the area.
• Freeing up the column structure and minimizing ground floor walls to allow greenery to penetrate deeply into the building while limiting harsh interventions on the ground.
• Ensuring that all spaces within the house are bright and well-ventilated through open spaces such as glass doors and skylights.
• Allocating the living room, dining room, and bedrooms to face south and southwest to take advantage of the view towards the valley with many beautiful landscapes, particularly the main highlight 2 km away—the majestic Đại Bình Mountain.

The main highlight of the project lies in the impressive and free structural system, inspired by the structure of bridge beams, where people have cleverly used strong and minimalist structures to meet the enormous load-bearing demands in cramped urban spaces. Here, although the space is very spacious, we still apply minimal dimensions to reduce the impact on the ground and to provide the building with more free floor plan layouts while creating a unique and aesthetic form.

The project primarily uses a bright white background color, complemented by natural materials that evoke a close and emotional connection with people, such as washed stone, granite, glass bricks, natural wood, etc., ensuring that users always have a close, emotional experience and a strong connection with nature.

In addition to the glass doors arranged on all four sides of the house to provide light and ventilation for all living, dining, and sleeping rooms, we also use round skylights that allow natural light to penetrate from the roof down to the ground floor. This ensures that the kitchen, laundry room, and ground floor bathrooms are always filled with natural light, while also creating unique and interesting lighting effects.

We always strive to incorporate as much greenery into the project as possible to help the owners and contribute to improving the overall urban environment. However, in this context, where there is already an abundance of greenery, creating more green spaces indoors or on the facade of the house is not very necessary. Instead, we focus on harmoniously connecting people with the existing natural environment of the land: utilizing the spacious surrounding land by planting additional fruit trees and colorful flowers; freeing up the column structure and minimizing ground floor walls to allow greenery to penetrate deeply into the building while limiting harsh interventions on the ground.

Team:
Architect: SPNG Architects
Photo credits: Hiroyuki Oki

Material Used:
1. Facade Cladding: Terrazzo, Made By Local Craftmen
2. Flooring: Flooring Tile, 60x60cm, DONGTAM
3. Doors: Aluminium, XINGFA
4. Windows: Aluminium, XINGFA
5. Roofing: Flooring Tile, 50x50cm, DONGTAM
6. Interior Lighting: Led Down Light, PHILLIP
7. Interior Furniture: Made By Local Craftmen