Đại Bàng

Đại Bàng, the Vietnamese word for eagle, is a garden built around a giant woven nest. It occupies a small plot among low houses, with a single-storey house at one end and the rest given over to planting.

The nest is the main gesture. Strips of bamboo are woven by hand over a light steel frame into a curved shell that rises from the ground, arches over a paved path and opens at the top into a wide ring. Seen from above, it sits in the trees like a bird’s nest. Inside, daylight falls through the bamboo in fine broken patterns, and the open crown lets the sky and the rain in.

A path of pale concrete, scattered with fragments of stone, loops through the shell and around a grassy island at its centre, where a few chairs and stools are set out. Climbing plants have begun to grow into the weave.

At the entrance, the path runs between dry-stacked stone walls to a violet door. The house beside the nest has a pale green metal roof that folds like a tent. Inside, the rooms are cool and spare: blue-grey walls, a deep blue floor, a warm textured ceiling, and a curved wall that sweeps down into a built-in bench beside tall windows facing the nest.

The design team worked the scheme out in models of sand, card and dried flowers, testing how the coil of the nest would meet the straight edges of the house and the plot.