“Transform this old Shanghai villa into a Thai hybrid?” At first, when listening to the owner’s demand, Thai designer Somchai almost knocked over the butterfly bean scented tea in his hand. But when he scanned the 1920s French style building with a laser rangefinder, his eyes lit up like a child seeing a new toy.
A month later, the construction team encountered an unprecedented challenge. To combine the Baroque dome with the Thai spire pagoda structure while preserving the original stained glass windows. The “steel frame+bamboo weaving” hybrid load-bearing system developed by the Songchai team has resulted in both European angel reliefs and flying fairy wood carvings appearing in the atrium. This breakthrough in traditional Thai decoration techniques has even attracted the observation of professors from Tongji Architecture Department.
The kitchen area has become a space for dialogue between Eastern and Western ingredients. Under the Italian marble countertop, there is a clay stove model crafted according to traditional Thai dimensions – of course, the actual one used is an embedded induction cooker. The most wonderful feature is the hanging cabinet design. When the teak cabinet door is opened, it will flip down to form a cooking table. This inspiration comes from the old kitchen of Songchai’s grandmother in Yegong Mansion.
The sound and light device in the second floor corridor was the idea of the young assistant. When a person walks by, the motion sensor will trigger the chime hidden inside the wall, playing the adapted version of ‘Along the River of Love’. The wall adopts a new type of environmentally friendly coating, which is mixed with Thai volcanic ash and Jiangnan silk, and can automatically adjust indoor humidity during the rainy season.
On the day of project acceptance, the owner discovered a “mechanism” in the study. Press the switch in the shape of the ancient book “Diamond Sutra”, and the entire bookshelf will rotate to reveal the darkroom, which is a 3D printed replica of the Sukhothai Dynasty Study. Somchai smiled and said, “This is the ultimate meaning of Thai decoration – let every space hide surprises, like peeling layers of banana leaves to find Glutinous rice cakes.”
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