Phương Nam Mansion

Closed gates separate a city estate with columns, balconies, and a main house from the street. The façade resembles a French villa, while the layout, colors, and decorative subjects were chosen for a Vietnamese client. Who designed the house and who owned it at first are unknown. Later, some rooms were given to schools, a wing with classrooms was built along the street, and during restoration it was dismantled while the old staircase and floors were covered with protective decking.

The French architect and restoration specialist Nicolas Viste forbade the workers to lift intact tiles. He had been asked to determine which parts of the mansion on Võ Văn Tần Street had survived from the time of construction and which had been added later. Manufacturers' marks were sought only on the reverse sides of tiles that were already cracked: damaging an intact one would have meant destroying precisely what the restoration had been undertaken to preserve.

The new owner, the company Minerva, bought the estate in twenty fifteen for thirty-five million dollars. Real-estate specialists valued above all the plot spanning three streets: to recoup that sum, a business center or office tower would have had to be built here. The company chose a different calculation—to preserve the villa and open restaurants, exhibition halls, and venues for cultural events inside it. A further twenty million dollars was earmarked for restoration.

The most difficult part began not on the façade but beneath the white paint indoors. Specialists noticed colored patches on the ceiling and began removing the later coatings in small sections. In one of them, they counted ten layers. Beneath them, wall and ceiling paintings appeared in almost every room: flowers, fruit, figures of twelve celestial maidens, and ornaments distributed through the rooms according to ideas about the five elements. The old craftsmen mixed pigment with animal glue, so the paint penetrated the plaster. During later repairs, people tried to scrape away and paint over the designs, but could not remove them completely.

Viste invited restorers from Vietnam, Italy, and Germany. Some identified the composition of the paints, others sought methods of cleaning, and a third group dealt with the masonry and imported ceramics. In the rooms, they found ninety-two types of floor tile; many patterns were designed in Vietnam and manufactured in France. The stone for the central staircase, by contrast, was brought from Đà Nẵng. The investigation revealed something else as well: the exterior, with its columns and balconies, resembles a French villa, but the layout, colors, and decorative subjects were chosen for a Vietnamese client. The architect's name and even the identity of the first owner could not be established from documents. The house was probably completed between nineteen twenty-seven and nineteen thirty.

The name “Phương Nam,” meaning “South,” appeared later: it was the name given to the mansion by a wealthy owner who bought it in the middle of the twentieth century. Then some of the rooms were leased to schools. An additional wing for classrooms was built along Bà Huyện Thanh Quan Street. The restorers dismantled this later addition, while the staircase and old floors of the main house were covered with protective decking. It was precisely the changes of occupants, the classrooms, and the repairs that left the layers which had to be separated from one another.

After the cleaning, the owners gave the estate another name—“Le Voile,” from the French word voile. It was meant to recall the coverings removed from the paintings. By the end of twenty twenty-two, they promised to open three restaurants here, hold exhibitions, and admit visitors to the restored interiors.

The opening did not take place. By the summer of twenty twenty-six, Phương Nam was again mentioned among the city's old villas that have stood unused for years. Behind the closed gates remained the main house, the cleaned paintings, and the ninety-two types of tile that Nicolas Viste had ordered not to be lifted unless necessary.