Some see these ancestral homes as little more than firewood but others are delighted to have such historic gems

When Loan de Leo found her dream house in the Vietnamese countryside, it was exactly what she had wanted. The soaring tiled roof, held aloft by the original timber beams, showed no signs of sagging or buckling. Its 19th-century wooden doors, carved with lotus flowers and water buffalo, were in pristine condition.

The fact that the house was used by the local People's Committee was only a minor detail — and, as it turned out, Communist Party officials wanted to put up a modern concrete building. "Before you tear it down, let me have the pieces," de Leo pleaded. Saving them the effort of reducing the house to scrap wood, "they practically gave it to me," she recalled.

De Leo, a Vietnamese-Italian businesswoman, hired craftsmen to take the house apart. She photographed each piece, and workers numbered every plank before packing them.

Similar scenes involving ancestral homes and community houses are occurring throughout the Red River Delta. Many of the old buildings have ended up as kindling, but some are being rescued by locals and expatriates.

In de Leo's case, moving the house to Hanoi, about 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, away, was easy. The real question was where to reconstruct it.

As a foreigner, de Leo was not allowed to own property in 2000, the year she found the house. (The National Assembly is expected to vote soon on extending ownership rights to some foreigners.) Her landlord, however, agreed to let her graft the old Vietnamese home on top of the single-story French colonial villa where she was living. While the marriage of the two houses seems implausible, it produced one of Hanoi's most remarkable homes.

The original villa was, essentially, undisturbed. So when visitors ascend the creaky wooden stairs, there is no hint of what lies at the  top.

The old house, which totals about 54 square meters, or 580 square feet, is entered through black lacquer doors. Massive dark columns, each carved from a single tree, support the vaulted timber frame of the roof, which is about 5 meters, or 16.5 feet, at its highest point. The sun streams in through the skylights, illuminating the roof's supporting ribcage.

Doors that in the past led to a courtyard now open to the second-floor verandah, where de Leo has her morning coffee.

The carvings throughout the house were commissioned by the original owner, a Mandarin who served in the Court of Hue.

"If you look up there, you see the words: 'Built in the fifth year of the Emperor Thanh Thai of the Nguyen,'" said de Leo, translating the Chinese characters carved into a beam overhead. Thanh Thai reigned from 1889 to 1907, which makes the house more than 100 years old.

De Leo uses the house as a formal dining room, adding an imposing altar with a somber Buddha and a display of her extensive collection of Vietnamese ceramics, many dating to the 15th century. For guests, it is like dining in a museum. For de Leo, it is a house that found a  home.

The French clothing designer Valerie Gregori McKenzie fell in love with the traditional houses of the Red River Delta in the late 1990s when she traveled the countryside to meet with  artisans.

She mentioned to a friend that she would like one for her garden in Hanoi. "Then one day he showed up and said: 'I have it! Where do we put it?'" she said, recalling the day in 1997.

Dismantling and moving the structure actually was a simple process, Gregori McKenzie said, because the houses were designed to be moved in case of flood or just because the owner wanted to relocate. In all, it took seven men 20 days to reassemble the house, which has about 54 square meters of living  space.

"The roof structure is locked with a small clef, or key, that needs to be removed in order to unlock all the wooden parts," Gregori McKenzie said. Moving "the wood is not a problem, but a few thousand old bricks and tile is."

Her house came from a hamlet in Ha Tay Province, about 40 kilometers from Hanoi. Gregori McKenzie said it originally belonged to the village chief's grandfather, who was a teacher, and it reflects his love of learning.

"You can still see on the left panel of the verandah some beautiful carvings of a schoolmaster with his student sitting with a large dragon over them, watching," she said.

One of the most ambitious undertakings was the restoration of a 22-meter-long community house that To Hanh Trinh found in Nam Dinh Province, about 90 kilometers south of Hanoi. It had been used by a Christian community, but its members were going to burn it to make way for a modern church.

"For one month, I tried to find a truck to bring the 9-meter-high beams," said Trinh, who owns several restaurants in Hanoi.

The only solution was to bring the house down by barge, and then it had to be adapted to fit her property.

Trinh has brought four houses, including the community house, to Hanoi. Three are used at Moon River, a retreat she opened in 2003 on the Red River; the fourth is a guest room at her  home.

Trinh paid $700 for the community house in 2001, including moving and assembling costs; the same house today would sell for about $50,000, if you could find one. But considering the cost of timber and their sheer beauty, said Trinh, they are still a bargain.

What will happen to the houses if their owners leave Vietnam?

Trinh, who is married to an Australian, said Vietnam was their permanent home, so the houses would be passed to their children.

De Leo's lease stipulates that she can remove the Mandarin house if she leaves; but because de Leo and her husband, an American, plan a long life together in Vietnam, she hopes to never have to make such a decision.

Gregori McKenzie is going to take the house with her, but only as far as central Vietnam. She has been using the old house as a sewing room and office for her clothing shop, Song. Now, the designer is going to move it to the seaside town of Hoi An, where she is building a weekend retreat.

As much as she loves the house, and as easy as it is to move, she said she will never take it to Europe. The Asian style would not fit there, Gregori McKenzie said — and she thinks that ultimately the house is not hers to keep.

"I would like to bring it where ever I go," she said. "But I think it belongs to Vietnam."

Martha Ann Overland