When the Viet Minh took control of Hanoi in 1954, Ho Chi Minh declined to move into the grand French Governor-General's Palace — now the Presidential Palace — that stood on the grounds of the Ba Dinh compound. Instead, in 1958, he had a simple wooden stilt house built for himself in the garden, modeled on the traditional houses of the northern Vietnamese highland minorities. He lived and worked here until his death in 1969, conducting meetings under the house and sleeping in a small bedroom upstairs. The deliberate simplicity was a political statement and a personal preference; accounts from people who knew him suggest it was entirely genuine.
The stilt house and its surrounding gardens are now part of the Presidential Palace Historical Site complex, visited along with the mausoleum, the original Presidential Palace (viewed from outside), and the nearby One Pillar Pagoda. The house is preserved as it was during Ho Chi Minh's lifetime: the desk where he worked, the small bedroom, the carp pond he tended himself. You view it from pathways outside rather than entering the house itself, but it is accessible enough to give a clear impression of the scale and character of the place. The contrast with the grand palace visible through the trees is pointed and clearly intentional.