My House Project

[Driller]

Hi,

I've just found this website today and I found the ideas and design philosophy expressed very refreshing. I have been researching energy efficient and sustainable design and most of the information I have found is either unpractical, overhyped or just plain tree hugging and I was pleased to find this community of realists.

I am a British Expat married to a Vietnamese wife with two young daughters. I bought a plot of land about a year ago close to down town Ho Chi Minh near the Saigon River. The plot is 700 square meters (approx 7600 sq. ft.) and best described as kite shaped. For the last 9 months I have been working with a French architect to come up with suitable house design for this location (see attachment for a rendering).

During this process we found that there was not alot of information available on tropical house design and went into alot of detail studying the sun's position through the year, shadow patterns and how the breeze is effected by the nearby river.

Another constraint that we have had to manage is my wife's insistance that we employ authentic Chinese Feng Shui consultants at different stages of the project.

We have currently finished the concept stage of the design and the drawings are in the hands of a structural engineer.

If its OK I would like to use this thread to document how the design got to where it is now, the decisions and compromises made along the way and update it as we move forward into the construction phase.

I want feedback and I welcome any constructive comments from anyone. However please bear in mind that the challenges faced doing this in Vietnam are alot different to other places in the world.

Note to moderator: If I have posted this thread in the wrong place please move it to where it should belong.

[Chris Stewart]

Hi driller, welcome to IH

I went ahead and made a new forum for your thread. Looks like an interesting set of design guidelines. (I don't know how Feng Shui actually works)

I look forward to reading more about it.

[Driller]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for moving this thread and taking an interest. As far as Feng Shui goes I ain't no expert and from what I have read a fair few of the professed experts are just selling snake oil. However my experience with what I believe to be the real deal has been pretty positive and I will do my best to relate my experiences and how it affected this project. If you don't mind I'll get onto that later because I want to put it into the proper contex.

First off I want to give a bit of back ground about myself and my familly because and understanding of our circumstances and needs is the reason behind this whole project and under pins all the decision making made so far. I don't appologise if this sounds like soul searching because thats what it is and I believe that can make the difference between creating a nice house and creating a home.

I am a 41 year old graduate Mechanical Engineer who was brought up in the English country side, studied in Central London, joined the oil industry and spent the last 15 years as a resident expat manager in various countries South East Asia and Australia. I have had a fairly comfortable upbringing but in no means sheltered.

I met and and fell in love with my wife 10 years ago when I was working in Vietnam. We were married with in 6 months and now have two wonderful daughters aged 7 and 8. My wife is 31 years old, from North Vietnam and had a fairly difficult upbringing due to the death of her mother at an early age.

I'm not going to write any more familly history as I hope you can already see we are very different people from different cultures with different aspirations and needs. We've learnt along the way to respect those differences and find common ground.

One thing we both share is a need for security, a good environment to bring up and educate our children and a shelter from the outside world. In other words we've been searching for a home for the last 10 years. Sounds simple enough! What's taking so long??? This is where our differences kick in and the common ground is pretty bare, stony and budget limited.

In 2006 this became more urgent because I took up a job offer to go back working offshore on oil rigs on a month on month off basis. This was a life style decision taken so that I could spend alot more quality time with my children and I have not regretted it once. it also meant the end to company paid for housing and schooling and that we needed to set up somewhere where my wife could manage and be among friends when I was away working

For a start it was pretty clear (though my wife wouldn't admit it at the time) that we needed a place in Vietnam. We moved back to Vietnam and rented a place but now we upped our efforts to find a place of our own. We agreed that were looking for a place that we would keep for some time. This meant that it had to be with in a reasonable distance of good schooling as the kids were growing up.

This effectively narrowed our house hunting down to a few small areas in Ho Chi Minh City District 1, District 2 and District 7. Having agreed that an appartment wouldn't full fill our aspirations District 1 was ruled out (costs there were of the order of $3000 / square meter just for the land and alot more for a decent address). District 7 was ruled out because it is a new development zone built by Koreans and is extremely plastic and effectively cut off from the rest of the city. This left one area District 2.

We must have looked at over 50 houses. Not one of the houses we looked at was insulated and none of them had been build to any building code. The main determining factor in cost was the size of the lot they were built on. They were all McMansions built to look flashy with no intrinsic quality or thought to how the occupants would actually live in them.

This caused my wife alot of frustration because she would research and find places that she though I would like only find out that I would reject them at first sight. It was at this point that we decided that the only way we could meet our needs was to buy land and have a custom house built.

So the primary goal of this project was to create a home that would meet all the needs and aspirations of my familly for the next 15 years.

(to be continued)

[Chris Stewart]

I get a few clients who have design requirement differences between partners but yours sounds substantial.

Where did the name orchid originate?

[Driller]

Hi Chris,

I had to come up with a name because my kid's insisted. One of their frinds is living in a house with a name.

My wife's name Lan is orchid flower when translated into English. In addition I used to grow orchid's and bonsai trees many moons ago and intend start again when I have my own garden.

Unfortunately this has been used for Hotel's in Singapore and by an Asian airline for it's executive lounges so it isn't original. Currently this is just a working name that keeps my girls happy but it may stick. I've challenged them to come up with something better but so far they've drawn a blank.

[Driller]

Now for a bit of heavy philosophy. Bear with me because I think there is some value in it.

On the surface we are a pretty very contrasting familly. My ideal lifestyle possibly due to my country upbringing would be to live on a piece of land so big that I couldn't see a neighbor. A desert island might even do if it wasn't quite so inconventient. My wife on the other hand due to her Asian upbringing would find it terrifying if there weren't any neighbors. This is a distinct cultural trait. Even in remote farming areas the Vietnamese build their houses with hardly enough space between them to walk through to the fields.

What I had to do was look deeper, beyond our ideals at the basic desires and try and find common ground. We could then form new ideals that would work for both of us and be realistic.

Sounds good but where to start?

Well number #1 is change. For the last 10 years we have been used to changing house, changing the country we live in, changing jobs, old friends leaving / new friends arriving, the change in society caused by the internet and living in Saigon it is one of the most rapidly changing cities in the world.

Alot of change is neccesary and alot of it is good and welcome but we found that both of us liked to cling to a few things that hadn't changed. We still frequented the odd cafe, bar and restaurant that we went to 10 years ago. Partly this is because these places had a quality that allowed them to survive, partly because you stick with what you know but I believe it is also because we need familiar places to act as an achor point for us in the face of change.

So one of our common desires was to have a place that would be still there for us in the face of a changing world. Even if we went working abroad for five years and we rented it out we would still have the security of knowing it was still there to go back to.

This simple requirement has quite an impact on the design of the house. We both wanted something which had a quality of permanence and timelessness. We would intend to use robust and long lasting materials. We would design in flexibility in the function of the house. We would persue quality and try to anticpate and be ready for the future (my kids will have a while different set of needs when they become teenagers).

Other requirements that complement this theme of permanence are security, independence and where practical self sufficiency, all of which we all could agree on.

One further need which is shared by only myself and my youngest daughter is that there should be intimate and private space included in the design. This is welcomed by my wife and other daughter but they could happily manage with out it. Conversely as they are highly sociable they require that the house is inviting and there are public areas for entertaining friends.

So having dug right down to our basic needs we've found alot of common ground. Now what was needed was to create a new ideal that would satisfy these requirements and we could all buy into. If we did this and built it we should have something we could call home.

(to be continued)

[Driller]

As I said earlier we didn't intend to buy land and build a house. It was something that was forced upon us because there was nothing available locally that was built to meet our requirements.

On the other hand by nature I have always been artistic and creative and have a desire to create something as a bit of a legacy. On the whole this is satisfied by my work and other stuff I do but it wasn't difficult for me to get bought into the whole idea of building a house as long as it was something I could be proud of.

At the same time I wasn't naive. At times my work has involved managing large and expensive drilling rig upgrade projects so I had a pretty good handle on what I was getting into. The only real surprise I have found is there is more emotion involved than I had expected and its not something you can ignore you've got to take it on board.

(to be continued)

[Chris Stewart]

Yeah I could see that, especially where you and your spouse come from very different cultures.