YOUTH HOME
speaks in silence.
At number 9, at the foot of the Trieu Viet Vuong slope in Da Lat, there is a tea house with a blue wooden doorway and no door. Since 2016, Quan cua Thoi Thanh Xuan and the home behind it have been run by young Deaf makers — founded by Vo Thanh Luan and Vo Duy Quang. Guests order with pen and paper. The tea has no price list. The soap and essential oils are made in the house, by the house. We were asked to give this place an identity — one that could carry a story this loud, without raising its voice.
The challenge
[01 / CHALLENGE]Thoi Thanh Xuan is one of Vietnam’s best-known social enterprises — a tea house where the whole floor team is Deaf, a home where two hundred volunteers once raised the timber, a workshop whose soap travels to stockists across the country. The story had been told by every newspaper. The brand had never been designed.
The brief carried a trap: design for a Deaf-run house and every cliche arrives ready-made — charity beige, pitying copy, a logo that apologises. The work had to do the opposite. The soap must sell because it is good soap; the tea house must be found because it is a beautiful tea house. And the whole system had to speak the way the house speaks — visually, quietly, first time, without a single spoken word.
The strategy
[02 / STRATEGY]One mark is a sprout with a lit window — the letter Y, drawn as something still growing, leaning over a home.
But the mark was never designed to stand alone. Put it side by side — on a shelf of soap, a row of cups, a run of stickers — and it tells the real story: the sprouts join into a treeline, and the windows multiply into a small neighbourhood. Many homes, sheltered under many trees — which is exactly what Thoi Thanh Xuan builds, one young person at a time. The wordmark underneath stays in script, because in this house everything that matters is handwritten — the orders, the thank-yous, the notes guests pin to the wall on their way out.
The house asks its guests to speak softly. The identity obeys the same house rule.
No taglines shouting from the packaging, no “support us” anywhere in the system. One pine green, one young-bud cream, generous quiet space — restraint not as minimal styling but as good manners: the visual equivalent of walking in softly and writing your order on a slip of paper. Dignity is the strategy. Sympathy was never asked for, so it is nowhere in the design.
The second asset is the house itself — the timber home two hundred volunteers built, painted in watercolour.
The painting wraps the cups, walks out on the paper bags, sits under every coaster. Guests carry the house home with the soap. For a place whose address is passed hand to hand like a secret, the packaging is the map: if you know the house, you know the brand.
Design system
[03 / DESIGN SYSTEM]Two colours carry the whole system — pine green from the Da Lat hillside, young-bud cream from the sprout — over paper, kraft and timber that stay unprinted wherever possible. The serif speaks for the house; the script speaks for the hand. Cards for the founders, an envelope for the letters the house receives from strangers, cups and bags for the tea that leaves, note cubes for the conversations that happen in ink. Nothing laminated, nothing loud — every piece is printable one colour at a time, because the house makes things by hand and its stationery should not pretend otherwise.
The system, in the hand
[03b / IN THE HAND]Photographed the way the house hands them over — on timber, on linen, in daylight. Every piece below is the shipped identity.
Impact
[04 / PROOF]A brand for a house with no boss, no price list and no small talk — only good tea, good soap, and the quietest kind of dignity.
- Serving Da Lat since
- 2016
- Deaf makers in the house
- 8
- Stockists carrying the soap
- 15
- Prices on the tea menu
- 0
The numbers are the house’s own story, as it has been told to Tuoi Tre and Kenh14 — two years of vocational training for each young Deaf maker, soap and essential oils wholesaled from Nha Trang to Ho Chi Minh City, and a tea menu that has never named a price: guests give what the hour was worth.
THOI THANH XUAN BELONGS TO ITS MAKERS. WE ONLY GAVE IT A FACE TO MATCH ITS MANNERS.
Credits
[05 / WHO MADE IT]CLIENT — QUAN & NHA CUA THOI THANH XUAN, DA LAT · FOUNDED BY VO THANH LUAN & VO DUY QUANG, RUN WITH ITS DEAF MAKERS. THE DECOR HUB.™ DESIGNED THE IDENTITY, PACKAGING AND COLLATERAL.