- Project: Tam Dao Retreat House
- Architect: Idee architects
- Location: Vietnam, Tam Dao
- Year: 2023
- Area: 2000 m2
- Photography: Trieu Chien
High in the cool, mist-wrapped hills of Tam Dao, a three-volume retreat slips between mature pine trunks and dense understory, blurring the line between architecture and forest. Tam Dao Retreat House by Idee architects is not a single, monolithic object, but a careful insertion into a fragile hillside ecosystem — a place where concrete, glass, stone, and steel recede so that trees, light, and mountain air can take centre stage.
Conceived as a contemporary mountain getaway for extended stays, the project turns a 2,000 m² sloping plot into a sequence of clear, legible spaces that always remain anchored to the forest canopy. Rather than dominating the terrain, the house yields to it: the architects preserved all 52 existing pine trees on site, using their positions as a natural grid from which the plan, volumes, and views emerge.
A hillside retreat choreographed by trees
The plot in Tam Dao comes with its own microclimate: cooler temperatures than Hanoi, constant breeze, and ever-changing fog drifting through the trees. Instead of clearing the site, the design team treated the forest as a non-negotiable framework. The house is threaded into the voids between trunks, with foundations and circulation carefully positioned to avoid any tree removal.
This decision produces a site strategy that feels almost urban in its clarity. Three detached volumes — one two-storey block and two single-storey blocks — are staggered along the hillside, aligning with the natural contours. Each volume occupies a small terrace carved from the slope, while the pine canopy above provides shade, privacy, and a sense of enclosure that architecture alone could never achieve.
Between these pieces, outdoor platforms, paths, and bridges stitch the project into a continuous retreat. The result is less a single villa and more a small, private hamlet in the forest.
Three volumes linked by light bridges
Organisationally, Tam Dao Retreat House is divided into functional clusters, each with its own relationship to the topography and views.
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The main living block — a two-storey volume placed at the highest point — holds the social heart of the project: living room, kitchen-dining area, and four bedrooms. Here, panoramic openings capture long vistas over the valleys and mountain ridges beyond, while the pine trunks in the foreground frame every view as a layered composition.
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Two single-storey volumes on lower terraces accommodate more private or auxiliary programmes: guest suites, wellness or recreation spaces, and support facilities that touch the ground more quietly, increasing privacy while reducing visual impact from afar.
Connecting these three volumes are slender steel-and-glass bridges. Elevated above the forest floor, they allow residents to move between clusters while always remaining in contact with the landscape — walking through filtered sunlight, looking over moss, boulders, and understory plants. Structurally light and visually transparent, these connectors avoid the sense of corridors and instead feel like open verandas suspended in the mid-canopy layer.
Cornerless rooms and immersive views
One of the retreat’s most striking gestures is the treatment of corners. Rather than enclosing living spaces with solid perpendicular walls, Idee architects replace many corners with two-sided glazing, creating “cornerless” rooms where views slip past the edge of the building.
This strategy has several effects:
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Visual expansion – Removing solid corners dissolves the sense of a fixed, boxed-in interior. Sightlines extend diagonally across the forest, making compact rooms feel larger and more open.
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Floating sensation – With glass wrapping around the edges of slabs, floors appear to hover among the trees, especially on upper levels.
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Soft boundaries – Instead of a hard break between inside and outside, there is a gradient: glass, balcony, balustrade, and tree branches create a layered threshold.
At the same time, the architects calibrate transparency carefully. Solid planes of concrete and stone alternate with glass, ensuring moments of refuge and shadow. Bedrooms can be intimate and cocoon-like, while living areas open up fully to the views when desired.
Material palette: concrete, stone, glass, and pine
Materiality in Tam Dao Retreat House is restrained and robust — a quiet counterpoint to the richness of the forest.
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Raw concrete expresses structure and mass, forming slabs, beams, and key walls that anchor the volumes to the hill. Its cool, matte finish sits comfortably in the misty climate and mirrors the muted tones of the rock below.
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Locally sourced grey stone clads parts of the lower levels and retaining walls, visually merging architecture and terracing into a single, geological layer.
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Extensive glazing is deployed where the forest can offer natural shading: large panes frame tree trunks and distant mountains while relying on the existing canopy to modulate solar gain.
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Warm interior finishes — timber, soft textiles, and subtle lighting — counterbalance the hardness of the structural shell, introducing a calm, retreat-like atmosphere inside.
The palette is deliberately minimal, allowing seasonal changes in foliage, light, and mist to become the main decorative elements. As weather shifts from bright sun to dense fog, the house feels alternately crisp, transparent, mysterious, and enveloped.
Climate-responsive design in a mountain microclimate
Though visually bold, the retreat is fundamentally climate-driven. Tam Dao’s altitude offers naturally cooler temperatures than the lowlands, but mountain sun can still be harsh, and humidity can be high. The design responds on several levels:
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Preserved pine canopy provides deep, natural shading over much of the roof and facade, cutting glare and limiting excessive heat gain.
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Orientation and aperture placement ensure that major openings capture prevailing breezes and mountain views while avoiding direct, low-angle afternoon sun where possible.
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Cross-ventilation is promoted by opposing openings in living areas and bedrooms, allowing cool air to sweep through the volumes and reducing reliance on mechanical cooling for much of the year.
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Thermal mass in concrete and stone moderates daily temperature swings, absorbing heat during the day and releasing it slowly as evening temperatures drop.
Rather than rely solely on high-tech systems, the architecture itself does most of the environmental work, supported by the forest as an active microclimatic partner.
Terraces, thresholds, and outdoor rooms
Key to the project’s character is the network of terraces, balconies, and in-between spaces that blur the edge between building and landscape.
Every major room extends onto an outdoor platform — a balcony looking into the pines, a terrace stepping down into the slope, or a small courtyard captured by the volumes. These transitional zones serve multiple roles:
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Daily living – Morning coffee on a terrace, afternoon reading in a shaded corner, evening conversations facing the valley lights.
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Climate comfort – Occupants can choose spaces with different orientations and exposures depending on time of day and weather.
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Forest immersion – At many points, people stand at the same elevation as mid-level branches, experiencing the forest as if they were perched in a treehouse.
Railings and edges are kept visually light, often using slender profiles and simple detailing, so the eye reads trees and sky before it notices steel or glass.
The infinity pool as forest-bathing platform
At the lowest part of the site sits a 50 m² infinity pool aligned with the slope and a long view down the valley.
From above, the pool reads as a calm, reflective plane nested into the terrain; from within, it becomes an immersive forest-bathing device. Swimmers look directly into the tree trunks and canopy, while the water mirrors sky and foliage, layering reflections over reality. The pool deck doubles as a sunken gathering platform, extending the retreat’s inhabitable landscape further into the hillside.
By placing this key amenity at the bottom of the site, the architects avoid visual competition with the house volumes and maintain the upper terraces primarily for living, not spectacle.
A quiet architecture shaped by ecosystem
Perhaps the most remarkable quality of Tam Dao Retreat House is how unforced it feels. Despite the complex topography and the strict decision to preserve every existing tree, the final composition reads as simple and inevitable: three clear volumes, gently stepped along the slope, lightly bridged, and carefully opened to the view.
This is architecture defined not by iconic form, but by relationships:
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between built mass and forest,
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between solid corners and voided, glass-wrapped edges,
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between the everyday rituals of living and the extraordinary setting of mist, pine resin, and distant mountain ridges.
In an era when many retreats lean heavily on aesthetic clichés, Idee architects offer something quieter and more enduring in Tam Dao: a hillside home that listens first, then builds, allowing the forest to remain the true protagonist of the story.
