Before PATIO CAFÉ, this was the home of a flower trader — a duplex villa that rose in Lê Văn Sỹ alley in the 1960s, with louvered shutters, encaustic tiles and a tree-planted side yard. To this day, the other half of the duplex is still lived in.
The man who revived the house is Cao Ngo The Tu Anh, an interior architect: “I saw the place and instantaneously felt its soul.” His philosophy is to capture the soul of the existing space and let old and new converse — no demolition, no fake renovation.
The name PATIO is its own story: the shop is named after the loveliest thing about the house — the vine-shaded side courtyard, “patio” in its truest sense. The architect named the shop “like naming a pet.”
