Saigon Story: Crazy Quilt Tile in a Courtyard Garden - Gardenista
By putting colorful patchwork tile on nearly every inch of the walls and floors of a tiny house’s open-air kitchen and courtyard garden, Vietnam-based architects a21studio transformed the miniscule into something magnificent. Designed for a journalist who works for architectural magazines and built on a tight budget, a 430-square-foot house in Binh Duong Province barely has any walls–its framework of steel beams is covered with a skin of see-through mesh and corrugated panels. A crazy quilt of colorful tile visually connects indoor and outdoor spaces and transforms the entire ground floor into a garden. Colorful tile covers the floor and kitchen counters and extends outdoors to connect the courtyard garden to the living spaces. From the street, it’s possible to see all the way through the house because the ground floor–which consists of kitchen, living area, and a courtyard garden–has neither a front or a back wall. A staircase made of a single sheet of folded metal runs the length of one wall leads to the second-floor bedrooms. Tiles cover the kitchen floor and wall of counters and sink. Upstairs are two small bedrooms. A patchwork quilt on the bed echoes the colorful pattern of the tile downstairs. An aerial view of the garden, as seen through the bedroom window. The steel facade doubles as a giant trellis for vines and climbers.