A crazy wonderful house in Dalat

Two days ago I explored a house that was a mix of a tree, a tree house, a termite mound, a ski lodge, a Las Vegas casino and Viet Cong tunnel.

I got there just as dusk was falling so had to run around taking photos in the waning light. The house – it’s called Hang Nga Crazy House – is in Dalat and was designed by a woman called Mrs. Dang Viet Nga, my hero! (And the daughter of Uncle Ho's successor, Truong Ching.) I wish more architects felt so unrestrained. It would be so easy to decorate our streets with odd, ingenious and perhaps tacky buildings (the last quality a potential liability with architectural creativity), but we (as in most cultures) sadly remain sticklers for the conventional and drably traditional.

The house (or rather houses...there were at least four structures) unfortunately is not very photogenic. It’s so chaotic, with so many bits and pieces interlacing and flying out in all directions, that it doesn’t translate well into one-dimensional photographs.


Here are walkways above the gardens, allowing you to travel along narrow, twisting branches like a squirrel.

Below is a little gingerbread cottage in the tropical alpine garden. (Dalat's altitude is 4,920 feet above sea level and built up by the French who left a chalet imprint behind.)

Here's one of the hallways wrapping around the inside of the bark of a fake tree. The trees were filled with nooks for bedrooms and little studies.


A nook!


Cutlery for the monsters when they arrive.

The mysterious garden, noisy with many belching invisible toads, revealed this illuminated spider's web after dark.

Lots of haunting sculptures around.