TOOB STUDIO Stacks Five Floors of Pink and Concrete in a Narrow Hanoi Renovation

The tube house is one of Vietnam's most familiar residential types: narrow, deep, and relentlessly vertical. In Hanoi's Long Bien district, TOOB STUDIO took a typical specimen and reopened it to light, air, and the canopy of a mature tree that the design was careful to preserve. The result is Long Bien House, a five-story renovation that replaces the sealed facade common to the typology with a perforated brick screen, slots courtyards between volumes, and punches circular skylights through concrete slabs to pull sun deep into the plan.

What makes the project worth studying is less the individual moves, which are individually modest, and more the cumulative discipline. Every floor is organized around a single spiral stair and a narrow void that threads daylight from roof to ground. The pink stucco cladding and board-formed concrete ceilings feel specific to their neighborhood rather than imported from a mood board. TOOB STUDIO treats sustainability here not as a technical checklist but as a spatial strategy: courtyards breathe, screens filter, and mature planting is left intact rather than cleared.

A Brick Screen and a Street Tree

The ground-level facade does its heaviest work with the lightest means. A checkerboard terracotta brick screen wraps the lower volume, filtering views from the street while allowing cross-ventilation to reach the interior without mechanical assistance. The steel canopy above cantilevers out to shelter the entrance and a parked motorbike, a pragmatic gesture that acknowledges how domestic life in Hanoi spills onto the sidewalk.

At dusk the composition sharpens. Upper volumes in pink and white stack above the brick datum, their cantilevers stepping in and out to articulate separate rooms. The existing tree, its branches tangling with overhead power lines, was retained as a deliberate design element. It softens the facade and provides shade to the courtyard behind the screen.

The Central Void and Spiral Stair

A steel spiral staircase occupies the center of the plan and doubles as the building's primary light shaft. Circular openings in the concrete slabs above allow afternoon sun to reach the lower levels in controlled bursts, casting shifting pools of light across the timber paneling that lines the stair enclosure. The effect is theatrical but not gratuitous: in a house this narrow, every lumen counts.

The open-plan living space on the upper floor wraps around the stair with a curved kitchen island, making the spiral the spatial anchor of daily life rather than a purely circulatory object. Exposed concrete ceilings remain board-formed, their grain visible, lending the interior a texture that balances the smooth pink plaster of the exterior walls.

Courtyards Between Volumes

Rather than treating the house as a single extruded mass, TOOB STUDIO split it into volumes separated by narrow courtyards. At ground level a steel-framed brick screen defines a semi-outdoor pocket beneath the mature tree, creating a threshold between street and home that is neither fully inside nor out. A young tree planted in the courtyard behind the perforated wall introduces a second layer of green, filtering the already filtered light.

Viewed from above, the pink stucco walls frame these voids like vertical slots, with the stacked glass volume of the stairwell rising between them. The courtyards ensure that no room is more than a few meters from natural ventilation, a passive cooling strategy essential in Hanoi's humid climate.

Interior Light and Material Restraint

Inside, the palette is deliberately restrained: board-formed concrete, white plaster, timber, and tile. A vaulted ceiling on the upper bedroom channels light through a narrow skylight that runs the length of the room, washing the walls in a gradient that changes through the day. The kitchen and dining area below works a similar trick, with afternoon sun streaming across the timber table from a tall side window.

The sunken circular seating in the living area is the most overtly designed moment in the house, but it reads as generous rather than excessive. Concrete ceilings overhead keep the tone honest, and the tall windows that admit the afternoon sun are proportioned to frame the rooftop context outside rather than to create a sealed, inward-looking enclosure.

Terraces and Rooftop Life

The rooftop terrace is where the house most visibly engages its neighborhood. A person sits on a curved illuminated volume at twilight, skylights glowing underfoot, with the tiled rooftops of Long Bien spreading out in every direction. It is a social space by default in Vietnamese housing, and here the design accommodates it with dark tile paving, a steel frame canopy, and planting pockets set into the perimeter.

A cantilevered balcony on the middle level offers a different perspective, with a glass balustrade that opens toward the traditional pitched-roof houses next door. The relationship is direct and unfiltered: Long Bien House does not pretend it exists in isolation. The narrow terrace with metal grating flooring and glazed sliding doors serves as the connective tissue between interior rooms and outdoor air, functional rather than decorative.

Color as Context

The pink is not incidental. Vietnamese domestic architecture has a long tradition of rendered facades in warm pastels, and TOOB STUDIO's color choice places Long Bien House firmly in that lineage. Seen from a neighbor's rooftop, the stacked pink and white volumes read as a family of the surrounding context rather than an alien insertion. The hue shifts through the day with changing light, from a dusty terracotta at noon to a warm glow at sunset.

It is worth noting how the color decision interacts with materiality. Where the exterior is smooth plaster, the interior exposes raw concrete. The contrast is intentional: outside, the house belongs to the neighborhood; inside, it belongs to its occupants. The recessed window on the upper floor, where a figure stands framed against the rooftop panorama, makes this duality legible in a single image.

Plans and Drawings

The axonometric diagrams show the volumetric logic clearly: four stages of assembly stack tan and pink volumes around the central void, with the blue-marked stair shaft running continuously from ground to roof. Each floor plan reveals how the spiral stair and planted voids divide the narrow footprint into usable rooms without corridors, allowing every space to touch either a courtyard or an exterior edge.

The roof plan confirms what the photographs suggest: the house is a series of hatched surfaces broken by planting and the narrow circulation spine. Bedrooms on the third and fifth floors are compact but each has direct access to a planted balcony, ensuring that no sleeping space is sealed away from fresh air. The section drawing makes the environmental logic explicit, showing how light and air move through the central blue void to reach every level.

Why This Project Matters

Long Bien House is not a radical reimagining of the Vietnamese tube house. It is something more useful: a patient, detail-driven renovation that demonstrates how passive environmental strategies, courtyard voids, perforated screens, circular skylights, and retained trees, can transform a common typology without abandoning it. In a city where narrow plots are the norm and air conditioning is the default response, this kind of work has replicable value.

TOOB STUDIO's contribution here is a matter of calibration. The pink facades, the spiral stair, and the sunken seating all give the house personality, but none overwhelm the environmental logic that makes the plan work. The project suggests that sustainability in Vietnamese housing is less about technology than about remembering what tube houses were supposed to do in the first place: stack life vertically while letting air and light pass through.

Long Bien House by TOOB STUDIO, Long Bien District, Hanoi, Vietnam. Photography by Triệu Chiến.

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