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THAILAND

PRACHACHUEN HOUSE

BANGKOK, THAILAND KANOON STUDIO

‘We tried to make this house reflect the life of the client. The way we worked was that I let him tell me all his requirements. It was very much a process of give and take, compromises.’—Chartchalerm Klieopatinon

The architects at Kanoon Studio had worked with this client before so they knew he would continue to add to his long list of requirements. But they also knew that he was well informed about architecture and that he liked to work in a collaborative way.

There was no preconceived idea of what the house would look when it was finished. The plan was that it would grow with the design process—and after the house was finished—because the design allows for changes. It has a lot of inbuilt flexibility, which the architects refer to as ‘latency’. By this, they mean they have provided everything the client wants but that extras are hidden. ‘If he wants to separate a room’, says Chartchalerm, ‘he can do so. If he wants to expand his house, he can do that too. We tried to make the space quite open.’

The house is occupied by an extended family. The client’s parents live with him, his brother lives next door (as part of the same plot) and the sons’ rooms on the third floor are designed to be self-contained so that one of them can continue to live at home after marriage. The family comes from northern Thailand, which has a strong timber craft tradition, shared by the family. As a result, the house makes good use of recycled timber. The original idea was to renovate the existing house which the client had lived in for thirty years, but it was quickly apparent that it would not accommodate the client’s need for extra space, especially for entertaining. The original timber house was therefore demolished and the timber used for the front fence. In fact, the house makes extensive use of recycled timber—for the flooring, the ceilings, the interior panelling, the dining table top, some door frames and the entertainment deck.

The client’s long experience of living on the site proved valuable when it came to how the site would be oriented. He knew the direction the wind came from, and since he was keen to maximize the use of natural ventilation this led to the idea of a wind chimney. In turn, this led to the idea of a rooftop entertainment area (with the potential for increased accommodation later) with a ‘safari roof’ to capture the wind and draw it down, using the linking stairwell as a wind chimney to ventilate the house.

The second level plan shows how the stairway and lift act as a pivot for the mainly public spaces.

Initially, the client wanted the house to remain close to the garden, but the architects argued that they could push the natural ventilation agenda further if they lifted the house off the ground. The client agreed and now the deck is a viewing platform down to the pool and into the lush garden with its established Indian banyan tree and two frangipanis. These provide shade for the pool and both shade and privacy for the master bedroom.

The front fence is made of timber recycled from the original house that stood on the site.

The double-height void of the living room provides a ‘stage’ for the music room.

This cross-section shows how the house is a vertical assemblage of spaces.

In the living room, joinery above the television provides storage space.

The ground floor is reserved for parking, a laundry and wet kitchen, and ample storage, for example, a generous shoe storage room and wine cellar, and for partying around the pool. It is also the starting point for the quaint industrial-style lift with its antique carved wooden stool.

Level 2 is essentially a free-flowing space pivoting around the stairway. It contains a guest bathroom with a laminated, corrugated glass wall and benchtop made from recycled teak, a gym, the parents’ room, an open-plan dry kitchen, a dining area and a double-height living area. The space can be opened up to the timber deck through fine steel-framed security doors off the kitchen and large sliding glass doors off the living area.

The spacious living area, with its contrasting facing walls, is the hub of the house. One wall is fully timber-panelled to conceal generous storage and is topped by clerestory windows, the other (by the stairwell to level 3) is a rendered wall with a Buddha shrine near the top, which doubles as a window from the master bedroom.

Level 3 houses the master bedroom and a music room for live performances. The music room has folding glass doors which open out on to the living space, effectively making the room a stage for performances. Heavy, carved traditional doors from India help isolate the room acoustically, while a bell and a red flashing light notify the musicians that there is somebody at the front door. The lady of the house has added a folding door to separate the master bedroom from the noise emanating from the music room!

This is a house that sustains an extended family and, through the use of recycled timber, their ties to their northern Thai origins. The inclusion of a wind chimney and the way the houses opens on to the shaded garden, means that the use of air-conditioning is reduced to the minimum. A highly flexible house, it manages to balance the occupants’ enthusiasm for entertaining with their individual needs for privacy.

The vestibule at the top of the stairs on the second level.

Floor-to-ceiling fenestration draws in natural light, while the rich vegetation outside provides sunscreening and privacy.

The double-height living area with the Buddha shrine/window at top right.

The barbeque area on the rooftop deck, which has the potential for further development.

The safari roof with its extended eaves.

The pool area enjoys ample shade from the well-established trees.

EQUILIBRIUM HOUSE

BANGKOK, THAILAND VASLAB ARCHITECTURE

Long section.

‘I like metaphor. I like meaning. I like the source of the origin and the outcome. There is a vocabulary of equilibrium throughout the house.’—Vasu Virajsilp

Sustaining the extended family in Asia has become a challenge in the new global economy, especially in the face of rapidly changing communications technology which threatens the survival of regional cultures. A younger generation of professionals has emerged who want greater independence and privacy but without necessarily losing the sense of community and continuity that the family unit provides.

As an alternative to accommodating the extended family in one building, some people have opted for family compounds, others for a variant whereby the parents buy an adjacent block of land for their children who then build their own house on it. This provides both community and privacy, with the additional benefit of added security, because each house can provide surveillance for the other. The Equilibrium House is an example of the latter solution to maintaining the extended family—connection with separation.

The client is an economics professor at a local university who lives in the house with his wife. He and the architect, Vasu Virajsilp, share the same aesthetic predisposition for clean, geometric lines and a fondness for concrete. Not surprisingly, they are both fans of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. The client requested a modern, low-maintenance home with a sense of pure form. He wanted it to have a ‘masculine’ or robust look and also that it be protective but not closed. He specified that the house be built in concrete with minimal use of other materials.

All of this suited Vasu. But, as he points out, this

is not a public building but a home. He encouraged the client to use natural materials, especially timber, to complement as well as ‘soften’ the concrete, and to incorporate lots of visual connection to the garden and water court facing his parents’ house next door and a ‘green fence’ to screen the living room from the road. The architect has also made a virtue out of the problem of getting a good concrete finish from Thai contractors by coating the concrete to 2–3 mm thickness. The look is smoother, the concrete is stronger and more durable, and maintenance is easier. The concrete also ends up with a variable tone so that it takes on a warmer and more decorative appearance. These strategies, says Vasu, make the house more liveable. Without them, it would be ‘unsustainable’.

The hallmark of the building is a chevron form, a dynamic futuristic shape which animates the building inside and out. The thrusting diagonals maintain constant visual stimulation. They are forces which seem to be continually pulling away from one another. This is first seen in the external massing of the building, with the cantilevered box of the master bedroom thrusting out towards the street and apparently against the rest of the building. The angled garage columns, which in fact conceal a drainpipe, seem to push against the roof.

Inside the house, the chevron shape is repeated throughout, but each time in a slightly different way. For example, there are variations between the three chevron-shaped windows in the master bedroom, the windows in the dining room, the detailing in the stairwell, the staircase itself, and the shaped opening on the upper landing looking down into the dining room. The chevron shape creates a rhythm throughout the house and acts as a unifying element. All these opposing forces are kept in a permanent moment of equilibrium—hence the name of the house. According to Vasu, equilibrium is also a characteristic of his client who, as an economist, likes to maintain a state of order and balance.

The house consists of a number of refined concrete blocks and planes pulling in different directions but held together in equilibrium.

The mix of chevron-shaped solids and voids gives the house a dynamic, futuristic quality.

Floor-level air vents provide natural ventilation in the dining room area.

A ‘green fence’ provides the necessary privacy to the fully transparent living room.

The house is entered through the garden courtyard and then by way of a slightly elevated transitional terrace. The living, dining and pantry areas, together with a breakfast bench, comprise one continuous space. Sliding glass doors can close off the living room if desired. Teak is used for the flooring throughout and for the stairs. Above the dining space is an open well with a gallery linking the master bedroom at the front of the house with two other bedrooms at the rear.

The house does not set out to be a ‘tropical’ house. It is a highly transparent house, however, which aims to maintain a direct connection with the green exterior. It has a high degree of natural ventilation, sometimes in quite subtle ways, such as the air vents beneath the window facing the dining room and the translucent glass master bathroom with its partly open-to-the-sky dry pebble garden.

This section shows the void that effectively separates the house into two pavilions.

A view from the upper level down into the living/ dining room void.

The dining area seen from the living room with the gallery void above it.

Chevron shapes add a decorative touch to the master bedroom.

Running alongside the water feature, timber complements the finished concrete and glass.

The master bathroom with a view through to the outdoor pebble garden.

Ground floor plan.

The geometric complexity, viewed from the upper terrace, has a strong sculptural quality.

EKAMAI HOUSE

BANGKOK, THAILAND CHAT ARCHITECTS

The house aims to engage with the street life of the neighbourhood.

The shutters, made from a mix of recycled timbers, can be closed for privacy but also opened to engage with the street.

The internal courtyard looks towards his son’s playroom.

‘I didn’t want a big house and I didn’t have a big budget. But when I was living in Thailand as a kid I loved the street culture. You had ice cream carts, junk men, dogs in the street, buffaloes. It’s a sad scene now because there’s no street culture any more.’—Chatpong Chuenrudeemol

Designing their own homes gives architects the opportunity to play with ideas and explore their own preoccupations. These days, clients typically want a house which turns its back on the street because security has become such a big issue. Architect Chatpong Chuenrudeemol understands this ‘defensive mindedness’, but he loves street life. When it came to designing his own home in the Ekamai district of Bangkok, he wanted to be able to balance his privacy and the need for security with engaging with the neighbourhood.

This interest in engagement is not just a sentimental idea. It is a recognition that social and cultural sustainability is as important as environmental sustainability. A large part of who we are is bound up with our cultural inheritance. Allowing a culture to die or cutting people off from a living tradition can lead to alienation, which is destructive at both the personal and social levels.

‘For us’, says Chatpong, ‘it is important to find our own language that’s rooted in culture, in the climate and in a lot of intangibles. And what I also think is important is the playfulness of Thai culture.’

Chatpong chose his site carefully. It is a corner block on a no-through road. There is, he says, a patchwork or quiltwork character to Bangkok’s streets which he thinks this street typifies. The scale of the houses and the way they relate to the street and to each other makes for what he calls a ‘street room’. For this reason, he wanted to keep his house to the scale of its neighbours. Rather than have high ceilings on the ground level, he chose relatively low ceilings—’because I have a child and I wanted the ceilings at the scale of a child’—which gave him the flexibility to go higher on the upper level and maximize the use of natural light.

The plot is rectangular but the house is L-shaped, with the entry and garage at the foot of the long leg. Arrival is through the internal courtyard, which is formed by the L shape of the house and the long street elevation. The outer ‘wall’ of the house comprises a row of vertical timber shutters. As Chatpong explains, the wall ‘redefines the perimeter wall urban house in Bangkok’, which typically has a wall and the house set back from the wall, creating an unusable ‘no-man’s land’ in between. During the day, the shutters open the courtyard to the street and draw air in to ventilate both the courtyard and the house. At night, or when the occupants are elsewhere, the house is secured by closing the shutters.

Just as the courtyard opens to the street, so the house also opens on to the courtyard. The north-facing aspect, along with a mature tree that serves as their ‘canopy’, ensures that the house is never subject to direct sunlight. In fact, the room most exposed is the upstairs western-facing bedroom of Chat’s son. But this borrows the lush garden of the next door neighbour to make it the coolest room in the house.

The timber shutters at street level are referenced on the upper level by the enfilade of timber-framed windows.

Ground floor plan.

Looking from the son’s playroom, the setback of the verandah and the tree ensure ample shading.

The courtyard and many features inside the house, such as the vertical casement windows upstairs and the narrow, vertical double doors downstairs, hint at traditional Thai houses with their typical use of timber, shutters and elongated proportions.

All of the timber used in the house is recycled from old Thai timber stilt houses. As Chat points out, using old timber is not only sustainable but also highly functional because it has been thoroughly cured and, therefore, is not susceptible to shrinkage. Door and window frames are all made from a local redwood hardwood. The louvres on the street wall are a mixed of recycled timbers, which give the shutters tonal variety. The floors and ceilings are made from tabaag, ‘the poor man’s teakwood’, a wood that is commonly shunned. But it is a highly sustainable timber because it is fast growing and not endangered. It is also inexpensive and completely termite-resistant. It also provided Chat with a light-coloured local hardwood which is hard to source locally.

Otherwise, the house is made from plaster and concrete with great attention paid to fine detailing, for example, with the door and window frames and with the ledges and overhangs which protect the house from run-off staining.

The house is open plan with all spaces visually connected to one another. The downstairs is kitchen, dining and living, with a bathroom and Chat’s son’s ‘everything room’ on the short leg of the L, which also opens directly on to the courtyard. This room, which is self-contained and semi-independent of the rest of the house, is significant because it signals a very specific understanding of the role of the child and his personal needs in the household. It is a recognition that the child is autonomous and not simply an extension of the parents. Hence, the child is given his own private space with its own entry.

When the shutters are open, the porosity of the house to the street is clear.

The son’s playroom, located on the short end of the L-shaped house, overlooks the courtyard.

Blackboard-style sliding doors in the playroom hide books and toys and can also be drawn on.

With the aim of optimizing space, the stairway to the upper level uses the depth of the wall to form a bookcase. The upstairs of the house is also very open, with a corridor spine overlooking the courtyard and incorporating a storage banquette linking the two bedrooms with a sitting room and a bathroom in the middle.

True to the sustainable agenda of the house, Chat has preferred to use recycled furniture. Some of this is classic Scandinavian, but other pieces are inherited, including his grandmother’s sofa and his own childhood bed, now used by his son.

Affordable and sustainable in so many ways, the Ekamai House also exhibits a high level of contemporary refinement. At the same time, its contemporary character does not prevent it from being a ‘good neighbour’ and helping to sustain a sense of community.

The double-glass doors hint at traditional Thai houses.

The furnishings and the vertical casement windows in the living room contribute to a sense of cultural continuity.

The inset bookcase on the stairway maximizes available space.

Scott Whittaker’s converted shophouse is thoroughly transparent, maximizing natural light, but cleverly protecting it from direct sunlight.

BANGKOK HOUSE

BANGKOK, THAILAND SCOTT WHITTAKER

Long section.

Front section.

Scott Whittaker is an Australian architect who initially came to Bangkok on a two-year contract but has been living there now for 22 years, in the process establishing the highly successful international design company dwp.

Scott attributes his interest in the Bangkok shophouse to his suburban upbringing in Australia, which engendered a hankering for the richness of urban living. He points out that today in Thailand shophouses are commonly seen as ‘old-fashioned, dark and second-class’, fit only to be torn down and their land consolidated for high-rise office buildings or condominiums. But he saw the potential to recycle and redevelop them into contemporary urban homes. This would not only preserve buildings of character but also avoid the destruction of traditional street life and local communities.

Scott’s house is located in a cul-de-sac right in the heart of Bangkok’s business district. Part of a row of neglected 1980s faux Roman-style shop-houses, it was typical of its kind—a simple concrete column and frame structure with brick infill walls with floors and windows that could be easily modified. While lending itself to adaptive reuse, the building typically brought with it certain challenges. Unlike the Chinese shophouse in Singapore or Malaysia, the Thai shophouse generally covers the entire site without a garden or an interior lightwell. It is dark with small rooms and windows and single brick party walls.

The sleek and minimal lines of the kitchen support the transparency by drawing the eye through the house.

The sitting area embraces the neighbouring streetscape.

Keeping the existing structure of columns and beams, stair placement and existing slabs, Scott aimed to create a contemporary home that embodied the spirit of the original shophouse without attempting to replicate it—in other words, a contemporary urban house which in scale and character fitted in with its neighbours. This involved optimizing the amount of natural light and ventilation but minimizing direct sunlight. In addition, the design aimed to introduce greenery and outdoor spaces and to connect with the streetscape while still ensuring privacy. The best time to view this house is at night when it glows like a lantern and you can see the way it integrates both vertically and horizontally.

Comprising 400 square metres spread over four levels, the Bangkok House gives the impression of being one continuous space, with each level floating in a loose and easy relationship with the others. The front façade is a framed box with extruded blade walls and canopy, extending on one side as a green wall to provide privacy from the neighbour. This box frames the whole house, but acts primarily as a sunscreen. At the rear, the house ‘borrows’ a massive rain tree for sun protection. Because of the free-flowing spaces, sliding glass doors at the front and back ensure cross-ventilation. Vertically, air is drawn up through the house in a chimney effect by an industrial-style ventilator at the top of the stairs.

Scott Whittaker’s home is really a very simple place with individual spaces merely indicated by furnishings or by minimal partitions. The master bathroom, for example, is hardly a bathroom at all with its free-standing bath sitting outside the shower recess more or less in the middle of the floor. Finishes have been kept to a minimum, and apart from some sanitary fixtures and travertine stone, all the materials have been locally sourced, including some recycled teakwood from an old Thai rice barn. The original slabs have been retained, except where sections have been cut out.

Spaces seem to float in a house which almost dematerializes, so it is surprising just how much intimacy and privacy is achieved, which includes clearly separate domains for the occupants and guests. Outdoor balconies and terraces are provided at both back and front, as well as a rooftop spa and a garden.

Double-height sliding glass doors and the set back upper level ensure ample light.

Even vertically, the house seems to dematerialize into a single flowing space.

This is a project which is sustainable in the sense that it has been able to give new life to an old building, avoiding the cost and embodied energy of demolition and reconstruction. But it is also sustainable in the sense that it simultaneously rejuvenates and maintains the streetscape and the local community, demonstrating an alternative to developments which turn their back on the street and an authentic community. This is in addition to its use of natural light and ventilation, and its preference for locally sourced materials.