Makeover in Vietnam

In 2009, Darren Chew and a few business partners opened L’Usine, a cafe and lifestyle boutique on the second level of a 19th-century building in downtown Ho Chi Minh City.

L’Usine’s space has ceilings that are five metres (or more than 16 feet) high and original cast-iron pillars that evoke Vietnam’s French colonial past. Darren, an Australian entrepreneur and a co-founder of Un-available, a Vietnam-based garment-manufacturing company, loved the aesthetic.

“I remember saying, ‘If this place doesn’t work, I’m going to take it as my apartment,’” Darren said. But L’Usine (The Factory) was a success, so he began searching for an apartment with a similar look and feel. Three years later, he found one in a 1927 building a few blocks away.

Known as the Catinat Building, it sits on the former site of a 1790 citadel, on a street that the French colonial government named Rue Catinat, according to Tim Doling, a historian based in Ho Chi Minh City and an expert on Vietnam’s architectural heritage. It once housed French companies and an American Consulate.

Claim to fame

The Catinat Building also has a famous neighbour: an adjacent apartment block that once housed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employees and was a launching pad for Americans fleeing the city, then called Saigon, by helicopter on April 29, 1975, the penultimate day of the Vietnam War. (The scene was captured by the late Hubert Van Es, a Dutch photojournalist.) Ever since, the five-level Catinat Building “has led a fairly uneventful life, its upper floors rented out as apartments and its prime ground-floor retail spaces hosting in recent years an ever-changing array of bars, cafes and restaurants,” Tim Doling wrote last year on his website, Historic Vietnam.

The building’s interior has a spiralling central staircase, with a wrought-iron balustrade that circles a fenced-in elevator shaft. (The elevator doors say “Poussez,” French for “push.”) The blue-and-yellow-tile hallway floors are badly worn and speckled with concrete patches. But they show traces of 1920s elegance.

Tim said in an interview that the Catinat Building is an example of early Art Deco architecture and that its staircase-enclosed elevator, once a common feature in the city, is now among the only ones left. In 2012, Darren visited a roughly 50-square-metre (or 538-square-foot) apartment on the building’s fourth level. Friends of his lived there, but they planned to move out and asked if he wanted to take over the lease.

Darren, 40, said the apartment was too small for his taste. But, in a stroke of luck, a neighbour said she could rent him her adjacent, roughly 70-square-metre apartment. So Darren brokered an arrangement in which he would knock down a wall separating the two apartments, and pay each landlord the equivalent of about $800 per month for five years. “They worked it out between them,” Darren said. “It was easy enough.”

By that point, Darren had also become a co-founder of District Eight Design, a furniture and interior design company based in Ho Chi Minh City whose pieces feature antique machinery and salvaged tropical hardwoods — a look he calls “modern industrial.” He assigned some of his employees to renovate his new apartment in a way that preserved its 1920s character.

New look

They laid a traditional parquet floor in the living room, for example, but painted it black to give it a contemporary look, Darren said. They also brought in several pieces of modern, industrial furniture from the District Eight collection; laid stone terrazzo tiles on the bathroom floors and walls; overhauled the wiring system; and installed three-metre-high doors between the open-plan kitchen and two adjacent bedrooms.

“You had these beautiful high ceilings, and if you had a short door it would kind of bring the whole apartment down,” Darren said.

He said the retail cost of the renovation was about $20,000, though he paid considerably less because he used his own company’s materials and did not pay a design fee. The investment made financial sense, he added, because he would otherwise have paid about $2,500 per month to rent a modern apartment elsewhere in the city, or $900 more than his monthly rent in the Catinat Building.

On a recent weekday evening, Darren strolled, barefoot, across the black parquet floor and looked out a panelled window that stretches across most of a four-metre wall. Four levels below, cars and motorbikes were rushing down Dong Khoi Street (formerly Rue Catinat) toward the Saigon River, and past the city’s historic opera house.

The commute to his office is just 20 minutes by motorbike, Darren said, and his apartment is a short walk from L’Usine and other bars and restaurants. He said he also likes how the building is mostly occupied by Vietnamese and retains a strong local character. But several other historic buildings in downtown Ho Chi Minh City have been torn down recently to make way for high-rise construction projects, and he thinks the Catinat Building will soon meet the same fate — no matter that it could easily be converted into a beautiful hotel.

“All of these buildings are going to go at some stage,” he said, gesturing out his window at a few other colonial-era landmarks. “This city breaks your heart.”