Hong Tien Garden Villa

Hong Tien Garden Villa replaces a former family workshop with a home for three generations. The site was once a place of work and hard years. It is now given over to family life, and the house is shaped around the memories and daily habits the family brought with them.

The house sits in a close-knit rural community where the neighbouring homes belong to the same extended family. Rather than break with the way they live, the design team reworked familiar domestic patterns in a contemporary language.

Everything turns on an open courtyard. It links the main living spaces and stays loose enough for daily routines as well as larger gatherings. Verandas, deep roof overhangs and timber screens make the passage from inside to outside gradual, keeping the house open while protecting the privacy that family life here depends on. The kitchen sits in a separate outbuilding, as it did in older rural homes.

The courtyard was first planned as extra space for planting. Use showed what else it could be: a place for children to play, for relatives to gather and for family celebrations. At the Lunar New Year it fills with ornamental plants and the long cooking of sticky rice cakes, and it has become the social centre of the house.

Concrete gives the building a restrained, contemporary base, and screens of lim, a dense hardwood long used in traditional timber houses, add warmth. The owner chose it partly for that history and partly for childhood memories of it, so the material ties a personal story to a wider building tradition.

The project is less about turning an industrial site into a garden house than about keeping relationships going across generations. Much of its character lies outside the walls, in the courtyard, the shaded verandas and the garden, where family and neighbours carry on much as before.