Phong House by Milimet Vuông — A Family Home That Listens to Its Village

Hòa Vang sits at the edge of Da Nang where the city has not quite arrived yet. The plots are wider here, the pace slower, and the feel of the village is still present in the way people move through their days even as new construction steadily fills in the gaps. For a young family building a home in this kind of place, the question is not simply what the house should look like but what kind of relationship it should have with everything around it.

Architect Võ Văn Thành and the team at Da Nang practice Milimet Vuông answered that question by paying close attention to the site, the climate and the family who would actually live there. The result, completed in 2023 on a 600 square meter plot in Hòa Tiến, is a house that earns its place in the village without making a performance of it.

Sitting in the Landscape

Of the 600 square meters of land, only 250 are built. The rest goes to garden, a wading pool and parking. That proportion is a choice, not a constraint, and it shapes the entire character of the house. The backyard extends 30 meters deep and feels less like a suburban garden and more like a private park that the family happens to have access to every day.

The second floor volume is rotated toward the southeast. In Da Nang's climate, where afternoon heat builds steadily and the right breeze makes an enormous difference to how a space feels, that rotation is entirely practical. It pulls the prevailing wind through the house and keeps the afternoon sun off the faces of the rooms that need it most. The ground floor garden corridor aligns to it, so the composition reads as deliberate rather than assembled from separate decisions. The pitched tile roof draws from Vietnamese domestic architecture but handles the reference lightly enough that the house feels contemporary rather than retrospective.

The Ground Floor

Inside, the ground floor is one continuous space for living, cooking and eating. Large sliding glass doors open the interior toward the garden so that the wading pool and the planted edges become part of daily life rather than something viewed from behind glass. The pool is 70 to 80 centimeters deep, sized specifically so the children of the family can play in it safely without supervision. It cools the air around the ground floor and reflects the sky and changing light across the interior through the day. These are three things achieved by one decision, which is generally the mark of a well-considered piece of architecture.

The Second Floor

The bedrooms sit on the second floor facing the garden and courtyard below. Vertical wooden louvers, produced by An Cường Wood Working JSC, screen the rooms from direct sun while keeping them well ventilated. As the sun moves through the day the bands of light and shadow across the walls and floors shift with it, giving the interiors a quality that changes constantly and makes the rooms feel genuinely alive. The interior approach throughout the house leans toward Wabi Sabi, natural materials left honest, textures unsmoothed, nothing pushed toward unnecessary perfection. It suits the house and it suits the village.

Materials

Exposed brick, raw concrete, timber and reinterpreted roof tiles run through the project consistently. These are materials from the construction culture of central Vietnam, used here without apology and without being dressed up into something they are not. Generous openings, skylights and the louver screens bring daylight and moving air into every part of the house. Overhangs handle the direct sun. At night, the lighting scheme developed with mp lighting gives the house from the outside a warmth that makes it read as a home with people in it rather than an architectural object being presented for admiration.

The whole project was built in eight months.

Photography: Quang Trần, courtesy Milimet Vuông

Architects: Milimet Vuông

Lead Architect: Võ Văn Thành

Lighting Consultant: mp lighting

Timber: An Cường Wood Working JSC

Location: Hòa Tiến, Hòa Vang, Da Nang, Vietnam

Land Area: 600 m²

Built Area: 250 m²

Year: 2023