Inrestudio Wraps a Three-Household Hanoi Home in a Double Skin Pierced by a Hundred Windows

On a riverside plot in the suburbs of Hanoi, close to the Red River, Inrestudio has built a four-storey house for two generations and three households: a parent couple and the families of their two sons. The site used to be farmland. It is now becoming a small town where housing plots sit beside rental factories. The area is neither urban nor rural, and it will likely change a great deal over the next few decades. The 100 Windows House, led by Kosuke Nishijima, answers that uncertainty with a terracotta-toned gabled block covered in openings of different sizes, none of them set on a grid.

The interesting part is not the number of windows. The architects say the name stands for abundance and is not a literal count. What matters is the depth behind the windows. The upper floors sit inside a double-layered envelope, and the space between the two layers is put to use. It holds shelving, desks, storage, recessed balconies and ventilation channels. In the architects' words, this is a generous periphery that an urban house cannot afford and a countryside house does not need. That makes this a suburban type with its own logic, and we think it is worth looking at closely.

A Red Gable on Former Farmland

From the air, the context reads as a loose spread of low roofs, fields and a wide river under haze. The house does not try to blend in. Its form is a simple gable in a strong terracotta colour, so it reads as an archetypal house. The scattered square openings stop it from looking domestic in any expected way. Up close, the elevations look almost random, as if the windows were placed one at a time for the room behind them and not for the composition.

The base sets the vertical order. The ground floor is dark, textured concrete with an exposed aggregate finish, and the coloured mass rests on top of it. At dusk the openings light up unevenly. That uneven glow gives you the clearest picture of how the building works: many separate households and rooms, each with its own relationship to the outside.

A Ground Floor That Runs Out to the Pool

The ground floor holds the shared living, dining and kitchen spaces, and it works almost as an open pavilion. Vietnamese basalt paving runs continuously from inside to the patio and the pool, so the glass line feels like a seasonal boundary more than a wall. The deep orange soffit reaches out over the terrace. It shades the kitchen and gives the pool edge a ceiling of its own.

Inside, the materials are deliberately raw. Exposed aggregate columns, concrete ceilings and stone floors give the family rooms weight. Timber and bamboo panelling, amber glass chandeliers and leather furniture warm them up. The palette is restrained but not austere, and the planting around the pool softens the hard surfaces without hiding them.

A Central Stair That Lets Three Households Pass

The plan's quietest decision may be its most useful. The entrance and stair sit at the centre, so the sons' families can reach the upper floors without walking through their parents' living room. This approach comes from the narrow, deep plots of the Hanoi tube house, where a central core has long been a practical solution. Here it does social work as well. Shared life is possible, but nobody is forced into it.

On the second and third floors, the bedroom clusters are arranged as continuous loops with no dead ends. That matters in a house built for a family that will grow, shrink and reorganise. Rooms can be reassigned without rebuilding. The daylit hallway with its black steel balustrade connects the floors without becoming a corridor.

The Thick Wall as Furniture

This is where the double skin pays off inside. Window recesses are deep enough to hold a vase of sunflowers or to sit in. Shelves, desk niches and wardrobes are built into the gap between the layers, so the bedrooms stay clear of loose furniture. The thickness also contains ventilation channels that help cool the rooms. In Hanoi's climate, that is a structural argument, not just a decorative one.

The ceilings are exposed concrete with an inverted beam system, which the client asked for. Because the beams sit above the slab, the soffits are flat and unbroken. The upper floors use compressed bamboo, a local material that resists termites. Raw concrete above and warm bamboo below gives the private floors a calm, workmanlike character.

Recessed Balconies and Offset Openings

Not every outer opening lines up with an inner one. Where the two layers are offset, the gap between them becomes a recessed balcony or a thin terrace. These spaces are shaded and screened from the neighbours, yet still open to the sky. Where the openings do align, you get a direct view out across pitched roofs, trees and a distant elevated bridge. That view is a reminder of how quickly this landscape is filling in.

The real skill is in this mix of framed views and protected pockets. The upper floors keep their distance from their surroundings, which makes sense given that no one knows what will be built next door in ten years. The envelope works as a buffer that can absorb change. It is not a fixed picture window onto a view that may disappear.

A Rooftop for Everyone

The top floor belongs to all three households. It holds a family lounge with a kitchen island, and it opens onto a large terrace under an open frame of red beams. The frame completes the gable profile without enclosing it, and it casts striped shadows across the timber deck. The ground floor is the parents' domain and the middle floors belong to the sons; this level is neutral territory.

The frame gives the house its silhouette while leaving the roof terrace open to the weather. The image of someone leaning out of a recessed window beneath it sums up the project: a solid house you can lean out of.

Plans and Drawings

The watercolour site plan places the house in a field of small roofs, ponds and riverbank, marked in red as the one intervention. The floor plans show the strategy clearly. A central stair and gallery anchor every level. Bedrooms and studies loop around that core, with closets and bath terraces pushed to the edges. The fourth floor splits into a lounge on one side of the stair and a dining terrace on the other.

The facade detail sections are the drawings to study. They test window variations one by one: some with balconies, some with niches, some with voids running the full height. Figures, a cat and a dog are drawn into the rooms. These are not decorative elevations. They are a catalogue of ways a thick wall can be occupied.

Why This Project Matters

Multigenerational living is common across Vietnam, but it is usually housed in plans that either merge households completely or divide them into stacked apartments. Inrestudio offers a third option. A central circulation core gives each family its own route, looping bedroom floors can adapt over time, and a shared rooftop gives the extended family a reason to gather. The house treats privacy and togetherness as things to design, not leftovers of the plan.

The double envelope matters beyond this single client. Peri-urban edges are growing fast across Asia, and houses built there face neighbours that do not yet exist. A thick, inhabitable skin that shades, ventilates, stores and frames views, while keeping the life inside at a slight remove, is a sensible response to that uncertainty. It is a strategy other architects working at the city's edge should take seriously.

100 Windows House by Inrestudio. Lead architect: Kosuke Nishijima. Design team: Nguyen Thi Bich Thao, Nguyen Phuong Thao, Nguyen Phuc Nguyen, Khoa Van Trung. General contractor: HLC. Location: Hanoi, Vietnam. Area: 639 m². Completed: 2025. Photography: Trieu Chien.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.