The garden houses are a unique function of Hue. The houses are traditional, privately owned, and set in attractive formal gardens. Some have connections with the outdated Royal Imperial Court. Hue traditional architecture has long been shut related to the natural environment. The garden houses mirror this association. Every is extremely individual - home and garden, people and scenery, crops, clouds and water co-exist and mix with one another in a harmonious context. 

Practically all of the garden houses have direct hyperlinks with the Imperial Court. Some are descendents of royalty or mandarins; others obtained patronage from the royal family. 

The garden houses are an important characteristic in Vietnam’s cultural landscape. Not solely are they old and attractive, but in addition invaluable assets for below standing the practical applications of the ancient sciences that governed their construction. Even in Hue, only a few stay intact, and those that survive do so solely due to the Vietnamese custom of the beliefs and rituals of ancestor worship. 

Tradition says that the house can't be bought out of the household if the links to the ancestors are to be maintained, but rocketing land values have increased the worth of the properties to astronomic levels. As time passes, the facility of custom grows weaker, and the temptation for succeeding generations to capitalize on the asset grows stronger.  

For example, the present occupant of the An Hien is the proprietor’s grandson and is already advertvanced in years. His wife is at the moment resident in France. Their eldest son lives in California, their daughter is an MBA and works in London, and one other son lives with his mother. All return for Tet every year to worship and keep the continuity of the ancestral line; however the bond of kinship that sustains the family is strained by distance. One or two generations hence might see them break altogether.

Not too long ago, the proprietor of Ty Ba Trang garden home died, and his successors determined to turn the house and garden into a large cafe. The former proprietor was the well-known Professor Nguyen Hue Ba, a famend musician, who made the house a museum of Hue’s conventional music, and blended the weather of song and melody with the design of the garden and the architecture of the house. Sadly, the intangible knowledge and knowledge stored in the garden house, and the insights right into a past way of life, are now lost forever.

The owners of the garden houses obtain no further benefits for opening up their houses and acting as guides. In every case, their motivation is to preserve the traditions and culture of the past by making their homes accessible to interested visitors. We usually include a visit to at the least one garden house for all our tours in Hue, and strongly encourage our guests to make a donation to the home proprietor to assist with maintaining his or her property.