Gieo Architecture Lifts a 1,700 m² Home Onto the Roof in Phu Tho

Gieo Architecture has turned one Vietnamese roof into 1,700 square meters of new living space.

The firm, led by Vu Ngoc Hau, finished the Summer Path House — a residential renovation in Tho Tang, Phu Tho — in 2025. Triệu Chiến handled the camera. Toto and Vietceramics supplied the bathrooms and tile.

The project description, written by the architects themselves, makes the premise plain: "The Summer Path is a residential renovation and extension project that transforms the roof of an existing house into a new ground, creating a connection between existing values and a new way of living."

That last clause is doing a lot of work. "Connection between existing values and a new way of living" is, in plain terms, a staircase.

Why build on the roof?

Tho Tang's ground floor has changed. The architects frame it bluntly: a "context where the ground level has increasingly been occupied by commercial activities, warehouses, and urban infrastructure."

Residences lost the ground. So the firm took the roof back. The new house sits on top of the old one.

That's a fair trade. Ground-floor retail keeps the street alive. A 1,700-square-meter penthouse keeps the family inside it.

How big is it, really?

Published kit: area 1,700 m², year 2025, lead architect Vu Ngoc Hau, photographer Triệu Chiến, fittings by Toto and Vietceramics.

No floor plan. No room count. No published price tag.

A 1,700-square-meter rooftop is the kind of number that does its own talking. The metadata, in this case, carries the headline.

What's the design actually say?

The brief frames the roof as "a new ground." That phrase reshapes a constrained commercial lot into a residential opportunity. It treats elevation as policy.

Summer Path is short on surprises and long on position. The clients paid for a view their neighbors cannot occupy — a view that costs extra structure, extra permits, and a contractor willing to concrete over their own roof.

It's an honest move. Hau's team pitched the client on a horizon the street itself no longer offers.

What does it signal for Vietnam's renovation market?

Gieo Architecture has read the commercial creep and answered with floor plans rather than a complaint. If Tho Tang keeps converting its street level, expect more firms to follow.

The harder question arrives later: how does a rooftop residential floor perform across a Vietnamese decade of monsoon and heat? Nobody publishes that paper yet. The renderings always look fine in November.