CELEBRATION
Tet Que Nha
A homecoming built for a network that couldn't go home - Vườn Xoài Eco-Resort, Đồng Nai, January 2022.
There's a specific kind of homesickness that has nothing to do with distance. By early 2022, a community of business leaders and their families in Vietnam hadn't been able to travel internationally for two years - hadn't gathered as a full network, in person, since well before anyone had heard of a lockdown. Someone asked a simple question: instead of trying to travel somewhere for Tết this year, what if we brought every region's Tết to one place instead?
That question became Tết Quê Nhà - "Tết, homeland."
CLIENTS:
Private Leadership Communities
NATIONALITIES:
Vietnam
NO. OF GUESTS:
90 guests
CONCEPT:
Homeland
The Brief
On the surface, this reads like a straightforward reunion: seventy members and their families, one venue, one holiday. But the actual brief carried more weight than that. This was, for many of them, the first time gathering as a near-complete community since the world had shut its doors - and the goal wasn't simply to entertain. It was to let people rest inside a childhood they'd half-forgotten, to bond across families rather than just business circles, and to let a specific value the network holds dear - passing wisdom forward, leading by helping, exchanging rather than hoarding ideas - actually be felt, not just stated in a mission line.
The Real Gap
Vietnam isn't one Tết. It's dozens - a different rhythm, food, game, and superstition in nearly every region. Most Tết-themed events pick one aesthetic and commit to it. We didn't. Inside the sprawling grounds of a private eco-park outside Ho Chi Minh City - dozens of hectares, deer and native birds moving freely between activity zones - more than twenty regions' worth of Tết found their way into a single afternoon: flower boats and fruit boats styled after the Mekong Delta, Bình Định's clay-firecracker tradition, cock-fighting games, a Huế parasol shading a quiet corner. Guests arrived in áo dài, received a hand-illustrated map at check-in, and were guided toward a threshold more than three meters tall - a bamboo gate built to feel like the entrance to an old Vietnamese village. Dried straw was laid underfoot so that stepping through released the actual smell of a working farm before anyone had walked another ten meters.
That gate wasn't a decoration. It was a deliberate reset, engineered to move seventy adults out of "business network" and into "childhood" in the space of a few footsteps.
The Signature Moment
Locals from the represented regions were brought in not as vendors but as cuisine tellers and culture tellers - people who cooked, played, and told stories alongside the guests rather than performing at them, becoming, in effect, cultural ambassadors for their own hometowns. A spice bar offered twenty regional dipping sauces built around something as simple as dried beef - the specific, unglamorous ritual of Vietnamese afternoon snacking, elevated without being dressed up out of recognition. A tasting menu of more than twenty dishes, curated by award-winning chefs from across the country, ran well past what any single region's Tết table would offer. And as the evening closed, two ceremonial cultural objects - painstakingly restored according to instructions dating back to old Thăng Long - were unveiled alongside a fashion show staged entirely by the community's own members, and a closing musical performance built from genuine sentiment rather than a hired act.
Every detail was built to be co-created rather than simply consumed: the food guests took home, they'd helped cook. The gifts they carried out, they'd made with their own hands.
What It Left Behind
The bamboo gate wasn't taken down afterward. It was gifted to the eco-park permanently - a quiet, deliberate act of environmental care through material reuse, and a subtle trace that a community had passed through this ground and left something of their promise behind. It's still there. Tết Quê Nhà, meanwhile, became something the network now returns to year after year - not a one-off activation, but a tradition it started keeping.
The gate itself came from a first collaboration with a bamboo artist and his studio - a partnership that, once this project proved out, went on to shape three more projects across the year, including a very different gala staged later that same year.
