CTA Wraps a Koi Pond, Planted Terraces and an Open Kitchen Under One Sweeping Roof in Ho Chi Minh City

Mac Casa is a 118 m² house in Ho Chi Minh City by CTA | Creative Architects, led by Vo The Duy and Nguyen Thi Xuan Thanh and completed in 2025. On paper it is a modest single-storey home: garage, kitchen, dining, bedroom, work room, a jacuzzi and a vegetable garden laid out in a long rectangle. In practice it reads less like a house with a garden and more like a garden that has agreed to host a household.

The interesting move is not any single material or gesture. It is the way the architects let the floor itself do the planning. Levels rise and drop to imitate natural topography, so moving from kitchen to workspace becomes a short climb through monstera, and the koi pond sits where you might expect a hallway. Over all of it floats a curved, canopy-like roof that shades the living zones and lets the walls stay open. We think the house is a useful test of how far you can loosen the idea of a room before daily life starts to complain.

A House That Begins at the Water

The front of the house is a pond. Stepping stones carry you across the water toward a concrete column and the open kitchen beyond, so arrival is a slow, deliberate act rather than a door and a corridor. The high view makes the logic clear: the kitchen and dining table face the water the way a conventional house faces a street.

The close view of the eave is where the roof proves itself. Shingles run to a drainage strip at the edge, and someone sits directly beneath it above swimming koi. Rain is collected and shed at the exact line where the household gathers, which turns weather into part of the furniture rather than something to be sealed out.

Dining Under the Slats

The dining pavilion is the social centre, and CTA treats it as an open shelter rather than an enclosed room. A long timber table runs beneath a curved slatted ceiling, with daylight breaking into patches across the floor. The slats soften the vault overhead and give the space a grain that the concrete columns and stone paths lack on their own.

Look at the afternoon shot with the lily pond and the brick-arched bar. The table, the bar and the water all sit within a few steps of each other, with no wall between them. That is the clearest expression of the brief: cooking, eating and sitting by the pond are treated as one continuous activity under a single roof.

Floors That Behave Like Terrain

Stepped planter terraces rise toward a glazed workspace, flanked by curved brick walls. This is where the topographic idea becomes physical. Instead of a corridor to the office, you climb a hillside of monstera and split-leaf philodendron, and the change in level quietly separates work from the noise of the kitchen without adding a door.

The low stone steps beside the tall brick wall show how carefully the terraces are scaled. They are shallow enough to sit on and wide enough to plant, so circulation, seating and landscape share the same surface. The risk with this approach is that a house becomes a sequence of trip hazards; here the planting is dense enough that the steps feel like a garden path rather than an obstacle course.

Perforated Skies

Where the timber ceilings stop, a perforated metal screen takes over. Looking up, you see the screen stretched above the slats, concrete columns and brick, filtering sun into a soft, shifting pattern. It reads as a second, lighter sky over the courtyard: open enough to feed the plants, solid enough to cut glare on the dining table below.

The layering is the point. Shingled roof, timber slats, perforated metal and open sky each let through a different amount of light, and the house moves between them as you walk. It is a passive strategy expressed through materials rather than mechanical systems, though the available information does not tell us how ventilation or orientation were tuned.

Brick Walls and Quiet Corners

An open house still needs places to retreat to, and the brick walls provide them. A narrow brick passage ends in a timber bench, a vase of flowers and light falling from above, a small pause that feels almost devotional. In the dining area, an arched timber door is set into a curved brick wall beside ceramic jars, a reminder that the curves are structural and spatial, not just decorative.

The bathroom continues the material palette at a tighter scale: a glass-enclosed pebble shower, a stone-clad wall and the same slatted ceiling, with greenery pressing at the window. Even the most private room borrows the garden, which is consistent, though it assumes a household comfortable with very thin boundaries.

Plans and Drawings

The ground floor plan confirms the long rectangular plot and the sequence: garage, koi pool, kitchen and dining, then bedroom, work room, jacuzzi and vegetable garden. The roof plan reads as parallel bands with a central glazed strip and a skylight panel at one end, which explains how light reaches the deep middle of a narrow footprint.

The sections are the most revealing drawings. A single curved roof spans brick walls, with the koi pool, garden and planted terraces tucked beneath and beside it. The orange-tinted kitchen, dining and working zones sit like warm pockets between green and water, a clear diagram of how the occupied rooms are threaded through landscape.

The concept sketches explain the intent better than any render. One shows alternating green and orange bays crossed by a single wavy path. The watercolor shows three figures sheltering under a cloud, a tree and a cave. Roof as shelter, garden as room, movement as a meander: the whole house is already in these two drawings.

Why This Project Matters

Mac Casa shows that a small urban house in a hot climate does not have to choose between privacy and openness by stacking enclosed rooms. CTA lets one roof carry the burden of shelter, then uses level changes, water and planting to organise everything below it. The result is a plan where zones are defined by terrain and light rather than walls, and that is a transferable idea for tight plots across Southeast Asia.

It also has limits worth naming. A house this porous depends on residents who welcome insects, humidity and constant maintenance of plants and pond. We do not see that as a flaw so much as a clear statement of values: Mac Casa asks its occupants to live with nature rather than look at it, and it builds the architecture to make that bargain feel generous rather than demanding.

Mac Casa by CTA | Creative Architects (lead architects Vo The Duy and Nguyen Thi Xuan Thanh), Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Area: 118 m². Completed: 2025. Photography by Hiroyuki Oki.

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