Project Name: Sadec Garden Hotel

Location: Dong Thap, Vietnam

Design Team: PAU Architects

Total Floor Area: 1000 m²

Completion: 2025

Lead Architects: Trung Nguyen, Huyen Nguyen

Feature: Vietnamese practice PAU Architects has completed Sadec Garden Hotel, a restrained hospitality project in the flower village of Sa Đéc that prioritizes landscape preservation over architectural expression. Occupying just 1,000 square meters of a sprawling 8,150-square-meter riverside site, the hotel exemplifies an architecture of deliberate restraint.

Designed for a French-Vietnamese client hosting tour groups in Đồng Tháp province, the project challenges conventional resort typologies by refusing visual prominence. Rather than imposing itself on the existing rhythm of canal-side life, the architecture operates as a carefully calibrated background, allowing light, vegetation, and local daily activities to shape the visitor experience. The design's most distinctive gesture is what it chooses not to build. Nearly 90 percent of the site remains untouched, preserved as living gardens, existing water bodies, and mature vegetation including areca and coconut palms. Where trees conflicted with spatial organization, they were relocated rather than removed, demonstrating an adaptive approach that privileges ecological continuity over formal ambition.

Sadec Garden is not designed from form-making intentions but from an attitude toward context. Architecture deliberately steps back, allowing light, greenery, water, and surrounding life to shape the experience. The reception area is conceived as a light transitional threshold that gradually introduces visitors into the inner garden. The accommodation blocks are organized linearly, with repetitive room modules and open corridors that act as climatic buffers. Rooms open toward varied views of gardens, ponds, and the town canal, while the restaurant and swimming pool are positioned as an open central space that encourages direct interaction with the landscape. Two low-rise accommodation blocks organize themselves linearly along open corridors that function as climatic buffers in Vietnam's tropical climate. Repetitive room modules open toward varied views of gardens, ponds, and the town canal, while the reception area acts as a light transitional threshold gradually introducing guests to the inner landscape. A central restaurant and swimming pool encourage direct interaction with the surrounding greenery.

Material restraint extends to the lighting strategy, where low, indirect illumination at night allows vegetation and spatial shadow to guide perception rather than architectural form. This atmospheric approach transforms Sadec Garden from destination into pause, a temporary dwelling where architecture exists only to the extent necessary, creating space for visitors to experience Sa Đéc's landscape and vernacular life at a slower rhythm. Materials and lighting are used with restraint to support shadow, texture, and spatial atmosphere rather than visual effect. Nighttime lighting remains low and indirect, allowing vegetation and open spaces to guide perception. Sadec Garden does not seek to become an iconic destination. Instead, it functions as a pause, where architecture remains present only to the extent necessary, enabling visitors to slow down and experience Sa Đéc through its landscape and everyday life.

Design Team: Founded in 2018 by Trung Nguyen and Huyen Nguyen, PAU Architects is a Vietnamese practice based in Ho Chi Minh City that pursues architectural beauty through quietness and equilibrium. The firm specializes in architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, and construction, developing projects that emphasize the careful calibration of light, materiality, and human experience within slower, more contemplative spatial rhythms.

Under the leadership of co-founder and lead architect Trung Nguyen alongside creative director Huyen Nguyen, PAU Architects has established a distinct design methodology rooted in restraint and atmospheric sensitivity. The practice approaches each commission through extended dialogue, iterative refinement, and meticulous observation, allowing spatial concepts to evolve organically until they achieve what the firm describes as intrinsic vitality. The firm's work always speaks quietly, through the light on a wall, the surface of a material, or the peaceful area between spaces, rather than through expressive forms. Each project is formed over time, through conversations, adjustments, and careful observation, until the space becomes right and has its own life.

Rather than pursuing formal expression or visual prominence, PAU Architects positions architecture as a responsive medium that amplifies subtle environmental conditions such as shifting daylight patterns, material textures, and spatial thresholds. This philosophy manifests in projects where built interventions recede to enable deeper engagement with context, landscape, and vernacular life. Working within what they term productive silence, the firm maintains that architectural precision emerges not from detachment but from closer listening and contextual understanding, ultimately producing spaces that integrate naturally into daily existence rather than imposing predetermined formal agendas. Working in silence does not mean being slow or distant. For the firm, it is a way to be closer, to listen, to understand, and to allow architecture to become a natural part of life.

The firm believes that beauty comes from the balance between light, materials, and people, in a slow and natural rhythm of life. Through in-depth research on site specificity, innovative use of materials and temporality, and continuous exploration of context, PAU Architects has established itself as an important contributor to contemporary Vietnamese architectural discourse, creating works that are both environmentally responsive and maintain architectural excellence. Under the continued leadership of Trung Nguyen and Huyen Nguyen, the firm currently occupies a unique position in the Vietnamese architectural landscape, focusing on creating vibrant architectural spaces that integrate traditional wisdom with contemporary technology.