Four Metres Wide: Trung Nguyen Architects Builds Roof House

By Elena Vasquez

A house just four metres wide now stands at the end of an alley in District 7, Ho Chi Minh City, on a plot of only 77 square metres. Vietnamese studio Trung Nguyen Architects designed Roof House for a young family with two children, wedged between two existing residential buildings.

The studio's core move was to trade floor area for what it calls "spatial quality". Every room in the house opens onto a small garden or terrace.

"The project is our exploration of a simple question, 'How much is enough to build?'" studio founder Nguyen Van Trung told Dezeen.

"Our aim was to shift the focus from maximising floor area to maximising spatial quality. This led to a compact, tightly organised volume surrounded by voids that were deliberately preserved," he said.

How does the house create 'breathing space'?

Those voids are doing real work. A yard-like garden at the entrance buffers the house from the alley, with planting and a tree set into a terracotta-paved terrace. To put the numbers in perspective: the plot is roughly half the size of a tennis court, and a chunk of it stays unbuilt.

"These voids are not treated as leftover areas, but as integral parts of the living environment," Trung said. "In particular, the garden creates a breathing space for the house, allowing family life to extend beyond the limits of the built volume."

"The setback, garden and porch form an intermediate zone between the dwelling and the alley, creating an inhabitable depth between public and private space," he explained.

What holds it together?

The steep terracotta-tiled roof is the organising element. It shelters a sit-out area connected by sliding glass doors to the open living, dining and kitchen space, finished with stone floors and plaster walls. Exposed tiles and beams run along high, sloping ceilings that make the narrow rooms feel larger; the roof level drops over the kitchen and bedroom.

A translucent sliding door separates the living space from a main bedroom at the back, keeping a direct route to the rear garden.

Upstairs, the rooms step back from the street. The list:

• A multi-purpose landing and children's bedroom on the first floor
• A studio and library space on the second floor
• Small balconies on both levels overlooking the front garden
• Blue-painted steel steps and a terrace linking the two floors

Smaller sloping and gabled tiled roofs cap the upper levels, completing the house's profile.

Can a narrow house stay flexible?

Trung argues the design reconfigures itself without growing. "Sliding partitions, level changes and variations in ceiling height allow this field to be reconfigured according to use and time," he said. "The architecture therefore supports multiple domestic scenarios without increasing the building footprint."

That's the mechanism worth watching: density fixed by the plot, flexibility delivered by movable parts and ceiling heights rather than square metres. Roof House joins a growing set of Vietnamese projects testing the same alleyway conditions, including ODDO Architects' TH+ House in Hanoi, which turned tall, narrow voids between rooms into a design feature. The photography is by Hoang Le.