Roof House, a skinny terracotta-roofed family home in Ho Chi Minh City

Trung Nguyen Architects started this house with a simple question: how much is enough to build? The answer is Roof House, a four-metre-wide home for a young family with two children. It sits on a 77-square-metre plot at the end of an alley in Ho Chi Minh City's District 7, between two residential buildings. Rather than fill the site, founder Nguyen Van Trung kept deliberate voids around a compact volume, so that every room opens onto a small garden or terrace.

You come in past a perforated opening into a yard-like garden, where a tree is ringed by a terracotta-paved terrace that buffers the house from the street. Under the eaves of the steep tiled roof, sliding glass doors lead into the living, dining and kitchen space, with stone floors, plaster walls and high sloping ceilings of exposed tiles and beams. A translucent sliding door closes off the main bedroom, which opens straight onto a rear garden.

Upstairs, a landing and children's bedroom, then a studio and library, look over the front garden from small balconies. They are linked by a terrace and blue-painted steel steps beneath smaller gabled roofs. It's a private home, but a generous lesson in building small for anyone interested in tight urban plots.

Our summary of a story from Dezeen, published 20 October 2026. Read the original

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