A selection of adaptive reuse cases in Ho Chi Minh City
Walk any street in Southern Vietnam and you’ll notice that most houses are modernist. It’s one of the rare places where modernism became the architecture of ordinary people, adopted after independence from France as a statement of freedom. Yet this heritage is disappearing fast. Unprotected by law (unlike French colonial architecture, ironically) and under pressure from rapid urbanization, mid-century buildings now represent only 15% of Vietnam’s urban housing stock.
In Vietnam, a new facade signals success: buildings are rebuilt as casually as they are repainted, which makes their reuse worth writing about. Two categories have recently emerged in Ho Chi Minh City: coffee shops and kindergartens.
Coffee shops
Highlands Coffee is a Starbucks-like local chain, today the largest in Vietnam. In 2025, it converted a mid-century modernist villa designed by Nguyễn Văn Hoa along Hoàng Văn Thụ boulevard into its first drive-thru.The villa was originally built for the family of a medical doctor and features two elements characteristic of Southern Vietnam’s tropical modernism: horizontal engravings in the washed stone facade, which allow the material to expand in the heat, and a brise-soleil filtering the afternoon sun. Small details, but together they give the villa its distinctive mid-century edge.
Not all of it survived the Highlands conversion. The concrete canopy above the entrance is gone, and a fresh coat of paint erased the raw warmth of the original stone. But at least the villa stands and, given its location, that is no small thing: Hoàng Văn Thụ has since become a busy highway to the airport, the kind of road that tends to erase every building under real estate pressure.
The drive-thru format is worth paying attention to. In Ho Chi Minh City, roadside coffee is an informal institution: hundreds of motorbikes stopping at improvised stands along the sidewalk, drinks handed over in knotted plastic bags. The Highlands conversion is a small but telling sign of how Vietnam is modernizing, and the opening going viral on TikTok, with several influencer videos reaching over 1.2 million views, suggests that social media may end up doing what preservation policies rarely can: making modernist buildings appealing again.
Highlands is not an isolated case. There’s a broader trend in Ho Chi Minh City: the Cocoa Project, Sipply Coffee, and Pacey Cupcakes among them.
Kindergartens
Along Nguyễn Kiệm street, a pastel-blue modernist villa emerges behind the streams of motorbikes: a zig-zag brise-soleil under a sloping roof, unlike anything on the street. It is now a kindergarten.
No documentation confirms it, but the villa reads unmistakably as the work of architect Tô Công Văn, nicknamed “Crazy Van” by his peers for his unconventional designs. He was one of the few Vietnamese architects to use butterfly roofs. A now-demolished villa attributed to him shows the same wavy canopy and roof making the connection hard to ignore.
The now demolished modernist villa attributed to Tô Công Văn. First photo from Alexandre Garel, published in Mel Schenck, Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture: Mid-Century Vernacular Modernism (2020). Second photo from Google Maps.
Reusing a Tô Công Văn design as a kindergarten makes sense. Anyone who has travelled through Vietnam will have noticed its schools: outrageously colorful, with cartoon-like shapes and unhinged geometry. The intention is clear, if not always elegant: to design places children would love.
Another of his villas in Thủ Đức district has also been converted into a kindergarten (although it is now abandoned again). Crazy Van’s villas found their match.
The kindergarten-converted villa along Nguyễn Kiệm street has been well preserved, if not for the periodic painted makeover that is so typical — and infamous — in Vietnam. A previous incarnation came in full rainbow; the kind that would horrify a preservationist and delight a five-year-old.
Whether these conversions satisfy the design purists is not the point. What matters is that they remain part of everyday Vietnamese life.
Coffee culture is huge in Vietnam: coffee shops are social spaces where people are more likely to hang out than at a bar. And, a little-known fun fact: Vietnam is the world’s second largest coffee producer. As for schools, even in Vietnam’s remotest villages you will find pristine new schools standing among modest houses. Education is clearly a national priority.
These buildings survive not as frozen monuments, but as places that keep changing with the city. In Vietnam, where everything is constantly morphing, that is the most authentic form of preservation.
Written by Alexandra van der Essen
Leave a Reply