Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Design Team: studio anettai

Gross Floor Area: 560.8 m²

Site Area: 934.8 m²

Completion: 2025

Category: Restaurant, Adaptive Reuse

Architectural Design: Takahito Yamada, Nobuhiro Inudoh, Tu Nguyen, Hirose Tsuchiya

Experience Design: for Cities

Construction: KhaViet Construction

Farming: Thien Sinh Farm

Ecosystem Research: Lepidoptera Research

Local Research: Lon Xon

Photography: Hiroyuki Oki

Design Features: Pizza 4P's Thao Dien occupies a decades-old villa in Thao Dien, Ho Chi Minh City, converted by studio anettai into a new flagship restaurant. The existing house negotiates roughly three metres of level change through split floors, stairs and cellular rooms, while most of the 934.8 m² site remains a mature garden. Rather than clearing the villa to impose a new hospitality identity, the design treats building fabric, topography, vegetation and traces of use as material already available for the next life of the place.

The project is framed by the idea of 'Local Regenerative', yet regeneration is not presented as a technical doctrine imported from elsewhere. Research and workshops around food, farming and everyday life drew lessons from Vietnamese practices of repair, adaptation and thorough reuse. These were distilled into actions described as As It Is, Earthwork, Shading, and Slow, Grow, Care. Completion is therefore not the final image of the architecture; the restaurant is expected to keep changing through operation, cultivation and maintenance.

The response to the villa's complexity begins by using what is already there. Interior and exterior level changes are broken into smaller terraces and paths that reconnect dining rooms, garden and edible farm. Existing walls and boundary surfaces are scraped and stripped rather than concealed by new finishes. After tiles were removed from the former swimming pool, its exposed mortar was retained as part of a semi-outdoor dining area. Demolition, repair and continued use remain visible together instead of being smoothed into a single moment.

A continuous ground plane now extends from farm to restaurant. Large areas of artificial paving were removed in favour of soil, sand, demolition rubble, brick, terracotta, earth-mixed terrazzo and exposed-aggregate concrete, returning about 70 per cent of the site to permeable ground. Edible crops, shade trees and flowers selected for wet and dry seasons form the working garden, while a wetland, aquatic planting and fish turn landscape from backdrop into an active ecological system.

Shade in the tropical climate is formed by retained tree canopies and lightweight structures. Slender steel columns carry delicate layers of thatch, agricultural mesh and stainless-steel wire across fields, paths and semi-outdoor seating. Rather than sealing the restaurant inside a mechanically conditioned box, these surfaces adjust light, air movement and bodily comfort through filtered shadows. The route between entrance, farm, wetland, pizza kitchen and split-level dining rooms alternates the scale of the old villa with the openness of the new framework.

The project's authorship extends beyond architects and builders. Thien Sinh Farm helped establish the productive landscape, with neighbours and project participants joining planting workshops. Operators, guests, workshop participants, vegetation, insects, birds and aquatic life all contribute to the restaurant's future state. Pizza 4P's Thao Dien thus shifts hospitality from a finished consumer setting toward an ecological site that asks for continuing care. Its argument is not a perfected green image, but the architectural clarity that can emerge from repair, retention and everyday stewardship.

Design Team: studio anettai is a Ho Chi Minh City-based architecture and 3D visualisation practice founded by architect Takahito Yamada, with Nobuhiro Inudoh as partner architect. Its name comes from the Japanese word for 'subtropical', signalling the climate and cultural setting in which much of the office's work is grounded. Founded in 2019, the Japanese-Vietnamese team works across housing, hospitality, workplaces, lodging and adaptive reuse.

The practice studies ordinary buildings, local materials and tropical ways of living amid rapid urbanisation. Peeling, selective demolition, lightweight construction and the continued use of existing fabric often become spatial tools. Its involvement also extends beyond conventional design delivery: at Hostel anettai the team participated in design, construction and operation, while visualisation is used elsewhere as a practical medium for collaboration across languages and locations. Architecture is approached as an ongoing engagement with real conditions rather than the production of an isolated form.

Pizza 4P's Thao Dien was designed by Takahito Yamada, Nobuhiro Inudoh, Tu Nguyen and Hirose Tsuchiya, with support from Do Thanh My Tam, Moe Watanabe and Oceane Raffestin. for Cities led experience design; KhaViet Construction delivered the works; Thien Sinh Farm, Lepidoptera Research, Lon Xon and OHQUAO contributed farming, ecosystem research, local research and research production. This broad authorship carries regeneration from a written ambition into planting, material reuse, ecological observation and long-term operation.