The Crazy House in Da Lat, and what it is like inside

The Crazy House is a guesthouse in Da Lat that grew out of the ground as concrete tree trunks, caves and animals, and it has been under construction since 1990. You can walk through it for a small ticket, or sleep in it.

What is the Crazy House?

The Crazy House, formally the Hang Nga guesthouse, is a hotel and sculpture built by the architect Dang Viet Nga from 1990 onwards. Concrete forms imitate banyan trunks, caves, mushrooms and animals, and staircases run over the roofs between them.

The Crazy House is a working guesthouse rather than a folly: ten or so themed rooms are rented nightly, each built around an animal — the tiger, the eagle, the bear.

Construction has continued in phases for more than thirty years, which is why parts of it are always scaffolded.

What does the Crazy House ticket cost?

Entry is about 60,000 dong for an adult, which at roughly 26,000 dong to the US dollar is a little over two dollars. Children pay less and guests staying the night enter free.

The site opens through the day and takes forty-five minutes to an hour to walk properly, including the rooftop stairs.

The ticket makes it the cheapest attraction in Da Lat and one of the more photographed buildings in the country.

What is it like inside?

Narrow, dark and strange. Rooms are lit by odd-shaped windows, walls curve, and the sculpted animals carry lights in their eyes — the tiger in one guest room has red bulbs and a lit mouth.

Staircases are the point: they run outside the structures, over the roofs and around the trunks, with low rails and drops on both sides.

Signs in the guest rooms ask visitors not to sit on the beds, because those rooms are rented at night and toured by day. It is the one arrangement that makes the place feel genuinely odd.

Should you stay the night?

Staying is the full version of the experience and a compromise as a hotel. Rooms run roughly 900,000 to 1,600,000 dong a night, they are dark, some are cold, and visitors walk past the windows until the site closes.

After closing the building empties and guests have it to themselves, which is the argument for booking one.

Anybody who wants a comfortable night in Da Lat should stay elsewhere and visit in the afternoon. The Da Lat page covers where the town's good rooms actually are.

How safe are the stairs?

The staircases are narrow, uneven and exposed, with low walls rather than rails in several places. They are the main hazard on the site and they get slippery in Da Lat's frequent drizzle.

Small children need holding rather than watching, and anybody uneasy with heights will find the roof routes unpleasant.

Sensible shoes matter more than anything else here, which the accessibility guide would say about most Vietnamese sites built on a slope.

What hour suits a visit?

Late afternoon, after the coach groups and before the light goes. The building photographs better in low sun and the stairways are less crowded once the tours leave.

Da Lat holds 14 to 23°C every month of the year, so the weather barely changes the decision — the mist does, and it arrives most afternoons in the wet months.

An hour is enough unless you are staying, and the Da Lat things to do page sets out what else fills the day.

Is the Crazy House worth it?

The Crazy House is worth an hour and the ticket is two dollars, which makes the question easy. It is genuinely unlike anything else in Vietnam and it is not trying to be beautiful.

Treat it as a sculpture you can walk through rather than as architecture, and it works. Treat it as a hotel and it is an expensive, dark room with tourists at the window until five.