역사가 가득한 마법의 도시

Turn into almost any hẻm in Saigon and the first thing you meet is a row of potted plants by the front doors, edging into the path. Look up and bougainvillea spills over a balcony. The Myst Dong Khoi was built around that pattern. Put simply, the hotel’s boutique design takes its cue from Saigon’s […]

In 2004, when a few damaged tiles were taken down from the roof of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Saigon, the words on their surface read “Wang-Tai Saigon”. Not a French factory at all. Wang-Tai was a Chinese merchant in colonial Saigon with brick and tile works along the Bến Nghé creek, and some of the cathedral’s […]

Ride Saigon’s Metro Line 1 out of Opera House station and the next stop is called Ba Son. Most passengers read the sign and think nothing of it. For more than two hundred years, though, that stretch of riverbank was a shipyard, founded in 1788, when the city was still known as Gia Định. Hammers […]

Turn off Đồng Khởi into Hồ Huấn Nghiệp street and within a minute you reach a tall building with greenery on every balcony. Look closer and it gets stranger. The entrance to this five-star hotel sits under a plain tiled roof like an old house’s, and the lobby holds timber piles, steel roof trusses and […]

Stand on Hồ Huấn Nghiệp street in the early evening and look up. The windows and balconies of The Myst Dong Khoi are scattered across the facade in an unusual pattern, with plants spilling over the edge of every floor. The Michelin Guide describes the building in much the same terms. In short, The Myst […]

It is eleven at night and you have seven booking tabs open for a trip to Saigon. Every hotel calls itself “steeped in local culture”. Every gallery has the same lanterns, the same bamboo corner, the same lacquer painting. By tab five they blur. So what is a cultural luxury hotel? Put simply, it is […]

Color is the first decision that touches everything else. Before the flowers are chosen or the invitations are printed, a couple settles on a mood, and that mood is almost always a color. It shows up on the save the date, in the bridesmaids’ dresses, on the napkins folded at each place, in the light […]

Weddings are quietly changing shape. The five hundred guest banquet is no longer the default, the flower budget is being spent with more thought, and couples are asking a simple question of every choice on the plan: does this actually feel like us? This is an editorial look at the wedding trends taking hold across […]

Every December, the same story plays out in offices across Saigon. The year-end party gets talked about in October, half-planned in November, and scrambled together in the last fortnight before the date. Most of what goes wrong on the night was actually decided weeks earlier, in a booking that came too late or a headcount […]