For the Client, the house was never intended to be simply a weekend retreat. It was imagined as a living archive of memory — a place where the past could remain present, quietly embedded in everyday life.

As their children grow up amid rapid urbanization, the parents wished to create a home where they could still encounter fragments of another time: the landscapes, materials, textures, colors, and quiet rhythms that once shaped their parents’ childhood in Southern Vietnam.

Rather than recreating the past literally, the architecture seeks to evoke it through atmosphere.

Brick, timber, stone, greenery, familiar household objects, natural ventilation, muted colors, and simple architectural gestures come together to form a space that feels both contemporary and deeply rooted in place. Throughout the house, architecture and landscape are intertwined, allowing every member of the family to remain constantly connected with trees, daylight, wind, and the changing character of the seasons.

Here, the vernacular is understood not as a stylistic reference, but as a way of preserving memory through space, material, and experience.

The house does not aspire to luxury in the conventional sense. Its true value lies elsewhere: in what the parents wish to leave to their children — a sense of belonging, an awareness of where they come from, and a connection to cultural values that might otherwise gradually disappear with time.

And so the story of Southern Vietnam is not displayed as an exhibition.

It is lived.

It returns when the wind moves through the house, when leaves rustle beneath the shade of the trees, when sunlight falls across an old texture, or when bare feet touch the rough surface of a brick floor.

Through these ordinary moments, the children may gradually come to know something of their parents’ childhood, their homeland, and their roots.

The house itself becomes the storyteller — quietly carrying memories from one generation to the next.