The narrow life of Vietnam: people are scared by houses wider than 3 meters (6 photos)

The historical quarters of Hanoi cannot be confused with anything, because they are built up with “tubular houses,” as they are commonly called. These are high-rise buildings with up to 12 floors, whose standard width is 3 meters. And the Vietnamese have lived in them for generations, which has given rise to a curious phenomenon.





A funny way has emerged to identify a Hanoi resident - he feels uncomfortable in houses of a different format and does not understand “flat”, that is, large one-story houses.



A bird's eye view of the historical district of narrow houses, some of the roofs are just not very good.

But the house can be very deep despite its narrowness - like a snake. Special unique ones are a “gut” 3 meters wide and 100 meters long. Thank you also for not following the curves of the street.

And the patio may be somewhere in the middle of these 100 meters. The roof is simply interrupted, divisions between floors are removed and greenery and trees are planted. It turns out to be a private courtyard, protected from street noise. And where only family members have access.





In front of each house, of course, there is a bench and a moped, what would it be like to live in Vietnam without a moped!

In essence, of course, it’s not a place – but a dream. But only for those who haven’t crammed six generations into one house at once.

Where did the chimney house culture come from?

The point, as always, is population density in Asia. Land in the capital is expensive, so the family built a house literally on a piece of land wall to wall with neighbors.

Moreover, usually the first floor was always allocated for a family shop or salon, and the second and third floors for a family where several generations live.



It looks very colorful, it’s great to just walk along such a street and stare at these narrow balconies

At the same time, the government chose a curious system of taxation based on the size of the house - it was calculated by the size of the facade. That is, tax collectors simply measured the width of the “showcase” of the shop house. So the locals began to narrow the width and add “snake tail” to the houses.

12-story buildings are no longer private. It rarely happens that a family falls into decline and decides to leave the capital, then modern super-narrow houses are built on the site of their 2-story tubular house. Well, purely Japan with its matchstick houses.



But Japanese narrow houses, even somehow poorer, the third floor, are probably afraid of earthquakes

Since families are moving out sporadically, and the authorities are protecting historical districts, Hanoi has no chance of switching to standard wide houses. After all, the owners move out spot by point and it is unrealistic to buy a lot of space at once.

You can wait 20 years, so it’s better to build a high-rise building on a patch of land. But in new houses you can make a garden on flat roofs, that is, plus another living space. But this changes the unique “colonial” look of old Hanoi.



Garden on the roof of a new type of narrow high-rise building

Have you seen houses like this in Vietnam? I really like it, there is no feeling of claustrophobia, like from the narrow houses of Japan.