Growing your own food in your own rooftop garden is real! Vietnamese architecture studio TAA DESIGN made this dream real and designed a family house that features a rooftop garden to make owners grow their own food in a rural village of Vietnam. 

Designed for a married couple over the ages of 50 who has been living in this rural area since they were born, this reddish terraced house creates its own vegetable garden from scratch. 

Named The Red Roof, the house covers 190-square-metre area with its cascaded structure and from the top, it's rooftop is only perceived with a piece of vegetables, trees and plants. 

Situated on a site on the main road of the village, urbanization has changed the architecture and living space of this village, according to the architects. 

"New houses with styles that one can easily find in big cities have disrupted their familiar landscape and lifestyle," they said. The house is meant for a married couple over 50 who has been living in this rural area since they were born." 

"In the search of a new appropriate typology for the context, we are convinced that adapting the new architecture based on the traditional cultural lifestyle of the couple is the most important task."

Creating vegetable garden, playground and connecting space

Connecting with nature, daily activities, gardening, paddy drying are part of the daily activities and vegetable gardens and multi-purpose playgrounds become the soul of houses in this village. 

In a small site, the architects designed the basic and complex functions on the ground floor, including bicycle repair space, living room, kitchen, traditional outdoor wood stove, bedrooms, toilets, paddy drying yards, rice warehouse, chicken yard, etc. 

The studio proposed small courtyards in the front, middle and back of the house, to connect indoor spaces with nature. Instead of having a large yard like other houses in the village, they created many courtyards with different heights, suitable for the height of the house structure. On the mezzanine floor, there is a small yard connected to the yard in the middle of the house.

The rooftop garden is adjacent to the courtyard of the mezzanine floor, creating a playground & vegetable garden that connects from the roof to the ground floor. The owners collect products from the garden and go directly to everyday meals, fresh and always available. 

"The couple has happy hours together growing their own food, and a lot of times, sharing their products with the neighbor families, unexpectedly, the architecture has been generating community social interactions as its by-product," added the studio.

"The rooftop garden also has the role of insulating the house. The internal temperature is significantly reduced compared to the corrugated steel roof."

Rural architectural typology

The architects also stated that in Vietnamese traditional landscape, "the red roof" house represented for a time of regional local architecture. However, now new multi-story houses with steel roofs seem to have lost the identity of the village landscape. 

The stair-step method reduces the height of the façade, helps urban space is not overwhelmed and creates a comfortable slope. This establishes the communication between the space on the roof and the space under the road. "The red roof" has the intent to keep, store and remind the familiar rural lifestyle.

Context

Site plan

Roof plan

Ground floor plan

Ground floor plan

Mezzanine floor plan

Section

Sections

Axonometric drawing

Diagram

All images & drawings courtesy of TAA DESIGN

> via TAA DESIGN