To fully know a city's architectural heritage, one must look beyond its designated sites and iconic buildings. For many, understanding a city's urban fabric and what makes it tick also means discovering the smaller-scale, locally appreciated, conserved buildings and popular gathering spaces. This is especially true when considering bustling Vietnamese cities, with their peculiar architectural characteristics, which can only be appreciated when learning about their many inspirations and historic layers, combining traditional Vietnamese motifs, modernism, local materiality, and climatic design solutions, but mostly by learning about the site constraints that are addressed through the implementation of the narrow tube houses and low-rise buildings.
These key styles and architectural movements are often maintained and even highlighted, as architects give a second life to many rundown or abandoned buildings, transforming them into popular coffee joints. They are reviving smaller heritage sites by pushing for their restoration and regular use by the community, encouraging visitors to acknowledge the historic relevance of the space, as they covet it.
The following 10 projects showcase different degrees of intervention and approaches towards conserved and reused buildings, reviving them as eclectic and beautifully unusual coffee shops.
Related Article
Vietnam’s Tube Houses: Architectural Strategies Under 100 m²
The Cocoa Project Café / T3 Architects
The main design intention of T3 Team was to recover the existing modernist Villa from the 50s and give it a second life dedicated to the Cocoa & Pastry. A place for Vietnamese to reconnect with their heritage and to realize the quality of their cocoa produced in the Mekong Delta. This elegant villa was totally invisible when we started the design, as decades of ugly industrial finishing materials were covering all walls, ceilings, and facades.
The Running Bean Café / Red5studio
To add the contemporary to a building that has conservation value right in the heart of Hanoi is the equation that we need to solve this time for The Running Bean, while we head North.
CoCo Cha Taiwan Tea & Coffee / PT Arch Studio
The main idea is to create a classic castle in the middle of a modern city, with the combination of two timeless architectures, to create a strong contrast in design intent.
Namra Coffee / D1 Architectural Studio
The old house once served as a wedding dress showroom with an original style of 70s modernist. Tan Nguyen – the head architecture was fascinated by the charm of historic architecture and decided to preserve the most iconic details to breathe in an impression of reminiscing among the new elements.
Okkio Duy Tan Caffe / sgnhA
Okkio is a specialty coffee shop located in a small alley on Duy Tan Street. It occupies an old French colonial villa, an authentic half of a semidetached villa among a few that remain in the neighborhood. Duy Tan fondly recalls the memory of our beloved Saigon.
DeHue Coffee / son.studio
The DeHue structure, colloquially pronounced as "dề Huế" in the local dialect, is a wooden house that has been repurposed into a contemporary coffee shop while preserving its traditional Hue architecture.
Tan Coffee / Son Studio
From the initial idea of an abandoned factory, we disassembled the old structure and replaced it with a steel and concrete one, except for the front house, whose concrete ceiling and old walls were left intact. The tin roof of the middle house was raised to give the feeling of "a factory".
Sipply Coffee / sgnhA
The design aims to preserve the building's existing conditions, which is a modernist structure with numerous priceless characteristics, while creating distinct perspectives for spectators.
Adiuvat Coffee Roaster Quinhon / A+H architect
An idea of a calm and serene place, located in an old street with a long history of the city, highlighted with the typical townhouse architecture style before 1975, which includes a ground floor & a floor with the signature pebble washout on the facades.
Bơ Bakery / Nhabe Scholae
Bơ Bakery renovation project is an endeavor to revitalize the ambiance of an old shophouse - an architectural typology characteristic of the Saigonese urban fabric.
This article is part of the ArchDaily Topic: Rethinking Heritage: How Today's Architecture Shapes Tomorrow's Memory. Every month we explore a topic in-depth through articles, interviews, news, and architecture projects. We invite you to learn more about our ArchDaily Topics. And, as always, at ArchDaily we welcome the contributions of our readers; if you want to submit an article or project, contact us.
.jpeg){kind=avatar}
