My Dad has spent nearly fifty years working as an architect designing all sorts of buildings. For him, however, the core of his work has always been homes. He always says there’s shelter and there are homes. But what makes a building feel like home? What makes a space feel great? What makes a cafe feel worthy of visiting? He reminds me it’s all in the subtle, almost invisible details. The ones you don’t see right at first. But the longer you stay, the longer you look, and the more you start to feel deep inside why a certain cafe feels special, why a space feels alive, and why some buildings become more than just shelter, they become homes. HÔM, which recently opened beside the Saigon River a couple months ago—gives you that feeling. HÔM feels like home.
When attempting to design a space that feels like home, the most important step my dad told me is figuring out what the heart of the building is. In other words: where do the occupants' wishes and wants lead them the most? For a cafe I feel it’s the moment when the customer enters and is greeted by the staff, that — space in time — is the heart. At HÔM you immediately feel at home, so much so, the staff says “Welcome Home” when you walk in. That got my attention. But what kept my attention was the actual heart of the building — the one made from paper mache hanging from the ceiling in anatomical form. There are the atriums, as well as the ventricles, valves, vessels, and septum. It’s powerful. Yet fragile. It’s visible. Yet subtle. Its message is essential. Yet seemingly subliminal. I didn’t fully grasp the message the first time I went, but like reading a great book the second time around the dots start to connect and you begin to admire how much thought and care went into the story. Like a great book, like a great space, like a healthy heart, each part matters.
As far as hearts work, each part is a matter of life and death. The atriums receive blood. The ventricles pump that blood out. The valves keep the blood moving. The septum keeps the oxygen rich and oxygen poor blood from mixing. And the vessels are the heart’s highways — carrying blood to the rest of the body. It is not a coincidence therefore that the cafe features a hanging heart in its organic form rather than its symbolic imagery. The organic is symbolic of the space itself.
The atriums, the receiving chambers, represent the register counter, receiving the flow of orders. The ventricles, the pumping chambers, represent the kitchen, pumping out good coffee, good food, and good vibes. The valves, the pathways that keep things moving in the right direction, represent the invisible choreography of architectural decisions guiding you through the space. The septum, the dividing wall, represents the floor to ceiling sliding glass windows, maintaining order between indoor and outdoor elements. Lastly, the vessels, the blood’s delivery routes, represent the customers, carrying that special feels-like-home feeling inward to different corners of the cafe, as well as outward to different corners of the community surrounding HOM. Like each vessel connected to the heart is vital, each customer is indispensable to the life of the cafe. The customer experience is always at the heart of every healthy business.
All that said, if you only go once and don’t stay for a while and don’t look closely and don’t feel deeply you might miss the connections all around you. You’ll see the pink painted walls, the subtle red touch on the furniture, the green plants, trees, and stairways. You’ll see the concrete, the brick pathway, the recycled wood, and the view of the river. You’ll see vinyl albums like Melodies by Tatsuro Yamashita waiting for you near the record player. And you’ll definitely see the dấu mũ accent in the cafe’s name, HÔM.
HÔM simply sounds like the word ‘home’ but also means ‘day’ as in hôm qua, hôm nay, hôm sau or yesterday, today, the following day, and so on. It also sort of looks like a roof above the ‘o’ as in the roof you return under at the end of each day. My dad, on the other hand, who as I mentioned has been trained over the years to notice subtle, almost invisible details, made an astute point that the accent on top of the ‘o’ sort of looks like the top of a coffee percolator. If you’re like me who wasn’t drinking coffee back in the 70's, it’s a type of pot used to brew coffee by continually circulating the boiling brew. The subtle detail got my mind racing. As the water bubbles inside, the funnel gathers heat reshaping the flavor of the drink in the same way the accent gathers sound reshaping the meaning of the word.
Furthermore, the top of a coffee percolator is sometimes glass and moves up and down in a rhythmic manner like a heart beat so you can see from the outside and the inside that something is brewing — just like how you can see through the glass windows of the cafe from the outside and the inside all the ideas percolating and circulating from different people meeting up. In the same way a single cup of coffee adds nuance to conversation, this single accent distills the meaning of the cafe as a whole. Or as the signage reads, “HÔM is where the heart brews.” If an ounce of any of that is true, what a clever design the architects drew up from letter to landscape.
Nevertheless, all these details could be there for all sorts of reasons, but I think the heart hanging there represents the big take home message. You don’t see your heart working every day to keep you alive, but it’s there. You don’t see inside other people’s homes and realize how hard they are working to keep everything together and maybe even keep a dream or two alive, but it’s there. You don’t see inside other people’s hearts and see how hard they are working to keep themselves upright and do their best to steer themselves in the right direction, but again, it’s there. Suspending a heart inside a cafe serves as a reminder of the heart inside of you and others. To remind you of the soul inside of you and others. To remind you of all of the subtle, almost invisible details surrounding you since yesterday, still today, and even the following day. It’s there, glowing above everyone, reminding everyone — like a building’s atrium receives light and creates space, it does so in the same way the heart’s atriums receive blood and creates life. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in The Little Prince, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
