“This furniture has been around for many decades, but you can use them normally without the fear of breaking them. Because they are industrial equipment made for the military or office buildings, they were manufactured to be hard as a rock,” explains Hoàng, a vintage military interior enthusiast. This durability is one of the many qualities that made Hoàng fall in love with the furniture, going so far as to set up a unique shop dedicated to them.
Depot No. 3 lies in an alleyway off Xô Viết Nghệ Tĩnh Street, opposite the Thanh Đa Peninsula. The somber green building features an address sign in stencil letterings, reminiscent of an army building. The aesthetic fits a store where military surplus items find new life.
Inside the building, an array of old furniture pieces fills every corner of the room. Most of the pieces are timeworn chairs, desks, lights, shelves, etc. Decorative framings of old Vietnamese maps and hand-drawn artworks in the style of vintage American advertising hang on the wall. The entire place feels like a storage room frozen in time.
A majority of the items in Hoàng’s outlet are bought from Southern Vietnam including Saigon, Biên Hòa, Đà Nẵng and Nha Trang. Affiliated with the US during the war, these cities had many American offices, departments and industrial buildings, or, as Hoàng calls them, “sở Mỹ.” Most of the shop’s pieces had been used as furniture in foreign offices during Vietnam’s 20th-century wars. After reunification, locals would buy the old items to recycle or re-sell for scraps. Hoàng sourced the broken lights, shelves, tables, etc. from these individuals via networking with many antique merchants, scrap sellers, or even construction workers. The prices vary based on the condition and age.
Once Hoàng acquires an item, he sends it to a workshop where two men repair the piece. “The repair process takes quite a long time and depends on the experience of the repairman. We try to refurbish its style and make it suitable for usage in modern times,” Hoàng says. The furniture gets repaired to take on its original form, while some aspects are modernized. For example, Hoàng prefers to use modern LED bulbs as they are more energy-efficient and emit less heat.
Hoàng can recall and point out the age and country of origin of each item in the building. Aside from American items from the 60s, there are also relics from other countries such as Japan, France, and Russia. And among the mountain of vintage furniture rests an obscure wooden door that leads to Hoàng’s own office, in which he stores his personal collectibles.
Nearly every item, from the clothes hanging on the wall and the furniture, to the appliances and even the trash can and water container in his office look like they are from a different era. “This is my personal space where I can work, rest, enjoy the scenery out the window or have a drink. People call it ‘man cave,’” Hoàng says.
Hoàng was born in Đắk Lắk and moved to Saigon around 2009 to study interior design in college. It was then that he became fond of war movies and specifically, their dated settings, clothing and accessories. He thus started collecting vintage items including not only industrial furniture, but also leather accessories, wooden furniture, vespas, etc. “The design and history behind these items are what I’m fascinated about. And when I research about them over time, my love for them grows,” he shares.
Hoàng’s passion for vintage military interiors also led him to make handcrafted items. When he learned of a vintage soldier sandal that he couldn’t afford, he challenged himself to make one, and after receiving positive feedback from his friends, he started making handcrafted leather accessories as a side hustle. This experience would later help him craft fully customized vintage industrial-style furniture from scraps he collected. The tools, leather pieces and metal bits on his work desk suggest he continues to do well with the handcrafted works.
Apart from his side gig, Hoàng takes on interior design- bnv jobs, and has had many opportunities to visit a wide variety of military surplus shops in Thailand during his work trips. Those visits inspired him to want a place for himself to showcase his hobby, “I want to express my personality through my spaces. Being surrounded by the things that I’m passionate about inspires me a lot in my work, and also I get to satisfy my collecting hobby too,” he says. So, Depot No. 3 was opened as a way for him to live out his passion, and also a means to sustain the hobby for a long time.
Hoàng also has a fair amount of books about vintage furniture. Flipping through the pages of one, he stops at a cabinet from a brand named Strafor, a French manufacturer of industrial furniture during the early 20th century. There's a 100-year-old Strafor cabinet on displayed right there at Depot No. 3.
The century-old relic is a two-meter high steel filing cabinet consisting of 30 lockers; it is a bigger version of the cabinet in the book. Among Hoàng’s favorite items in the shop, he refers to this shelf as “the big brother of the house.” While Hoàng doesn’t give any specific details about the journey of how the Strafor cabinet got there, he mentions that he was extremely lucky to have acquired it from a trusted friend. Furthermore, he shares: “These things existed a long time ago, so they were hard to come by. They tended to be turned into scraps when they got old because people preferred new furniture back then; they didn’t know that many years later the new generation would seek out these things.”
Running a vintage store comes with many struggles, and Hoàng faces understandable difficulties in running Depot No. 3: “Some people seem to question the high prices of the items. I think they just don't understand it well enough and a bit of research can help them understand why these things are valued this way,” he says.
“But I’m always happy to share with them what I know in the hope that people can have more understanding of the interesting history behind these relics. We want to properly repair these items and rightly value them and the work that our repairmen put in, so we don’t want to devalue our own work. There will always be difficulties, but I just want to try my best.”
Depot No. 3 is located at 801/89 Xô Viết Nghệ Tĩnh, Ward 26, Bình Thạnh, HCMC.
