Southeastern Promises

A Vietnamese Couple Turn to a Parisian Expat, Interior Designer Bruno De Caumont, to Bring Layers of History to Their Traditional-style House Outside Ho Chi Minh City.

- Richard Powers

LACQUERWORK IS ONE OF VIETNAM’S OLDEST art forms, dating back thousands of years. The ancient technique is what initially brought French interior architect and decorator Bruno de Caumont to Vietnam, first as a visitor and then as a permanent resident of Ho Chi Minh City, where his luxe collection of vividly lacquered furniture—inspired by the 18th-century Directoire period, a favorite of this former Parisian antiques dealer—is still painstakingly fabricated by local artisans.

In a lovely reversal of roles, as de Caumont looked to his new home for inspiration and craftsmanship, several local connoisseurs began to look to the debonair designer—a descendant of Ange Jacques Gabriel, the architect of Paris’s Place de la Concorde—for his expertise in, of all things, authentic Vietnamese decor. A prominent physician, Chanh Tran Tien, and his wife, Trang, enlisted de Caumont to renovate a property in Ho Chi Minh City’s countryside after paying a visit to La Villa Verte, the designer’s home and studio 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.”