ELLE DECOR 95In the outdoor dining
area, the dining table and
chairs are custom, and
the 18th-century altar
table, chandelier, and
sconces are from a local
antiques market. The vin-
tage encaustic floor tiles
are original to the home.authentic Vietnamese decor. A prominent physician, Chanh
Tran Tien, and his wife, Trang, enlisted de Caumont to ren-
ovate a property in Ho Chi Minh City’s countryside after
paying a visit to La Villa Verte, the designer’s home and stu-
dio in town, where the rooms are splashed in mod hues like
hot pink and kelly green and decorated with his chromatic
collections of furniture, rugs, and encaustic tiles, all made
in nearby factories. “When everyone was doing black-and-
white rooms, it was very painful for me,” the designer says.
“It’s the most impersonal design. Color reveals who you
really are.”
The house, which was built in the 1990s and abandonedabout a decade ago, was in a sad state when it was pur-
chased in 2014. The straw roof had collapsed, damaging the
interiors; grass and weeds had spread from the garden onto
the veranda; and a small pool sat neglected. Transforming
the property into a quietly stunning, welcoming retreat
would be no small feat. “They wanted a home that looked
like it had been in the family forever,” de Caumont recalls.
“There is nothing I didn’t design in the house, even the
door handles.”
To achieve an air of authentic antiquity, de Caumont
started where all good students of the decorative arts should
begin: in the public library, where he pored over books and
photographs of historic Vietnamese interiors. “I began to
understand the mix that exists here of 19th-century French
architecture and the Asian style of Art Deco furniture,
which is a little more Rococo,” he explains.
He focused on creating an environment that was all
about the feeling of living outdoors. What was once a small,
squat structure has been reimagined into an airy one-story,
six-bedroom residence that forms a U shape with a 65-foot