HANOI — Tall, thin and brightly colored, Hanoi’s “tube houses” dominate the city’s streets as nine million people compete for space in Vietnam’s bustling capital.
Although Vietnam saw a number of villas and garden houses built during the French colonial period, Hanoi has few of these grand residential homes.
Instead, tree-lined streets are packed with dwellings that are barely four meters wide, but are three times that in depth.
Typically, a tube house might be home to a family of four but two or three generations of relatives sometimes have to jostle for space.
The first tube houses — known as “nha ong” in Vietnamese — are thought to have appea…
Keep on reading: The ‘tube houses’ that dominate Hanoi’s streets