When I traveled to the town of Da Lat, in Vietnam, everyone kept mentioning a very bizarre place that I absolutely HAD to see: the Crazy House. Did they want to send me to some kind of mental asylum or crazy traveler’s institution? Fortunately no. As I found out later, this mysterious Crazy House is one of Asia’s most wacky, creative and unconventional hotels.
Its official name is Hang Nga Guesthouse, and at first glance, this curious hotel looks like Wonderland mixed with Winnie the Pooh’s treehut, with a magic touch of Antoni Gaudi and Salvador Dali style.
Once inside, you will discover that this surrealistic building doesn’t follow any architectural conventions or rules: there are stairs that lead to nowhere, handrails that look like intertwining branches, small tea tables put inside holes in the wall, long walkways that feel like caves, spider web shaped windows, slides and bridges that take you inside the surrounding nature.
This fairy tale house was opened to the public in 1990 and was designed by Hang Viet Nga, a Vietnamese woman who studied architecture in Moscow and was highly inspired by the work of the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. Her father was president of Vietnam in the 1980s, however, it was very hard for her to get the approval from the government to build this hotel since they thought it was not in line with the socialist architecture of the country. She started building the guesthouse with private funding and finally got the approval from the local authorities to continue freely with her work.
Nowadays, the guesthouse also functions as an art gallery and can be visited by tourists. For those who wish to spend the night, there are 10 rooms to choose from, each one themed after an animal, from the “eagle-room” to the “kangaroo room”.
It was a very fun experience to get lost inside the maze of this tree house, meet wild creatures made of wood, come across giant mushrooms and play happily like a child.
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