The style of Chang Mai
BY SUSAN SPANO
Los Angeles Times
April 13, 2007, 5:00 PM EDT
About 30 years ago, the gods of style looked down from design heaven on a town in central New Mexico. It was dusty and small, but they thought it had potential, so they nodded and turned it into Santa Fe.
They worked the same magic in Art Deco South Beach, French-Moroccan Marrakech and Midcentury Modern Palm Springs, transforming unlikely places into global centers for cool contemporary architecture and design.
They're at it again in Chiang Mai, the old northern capital of Thailand, founded at 4 a.m. on the eighth day of the waxing moon in the month of Visakha and the Year of the Monkey, or 1296, a date dictated by Indian cosmology. More than 700 years later, a construction boom has given Chiang Mai some of the most stylish hotels and restaurants in Southeast Asia. Galleries and design stores have opened, showcasing textiles, ceramics, furniture, antiques and architectural salvage.
A decade ago, there was nothing cutting-edge about Chiang Mai, 400 miles north of Bangkok. The backpacker crowd chilled out in budget digs, trekked to ethnic tribal villages in the countryside, bought fake objets d'art and feasted on dollar-a-plate pad Thai.
But then Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister of Thailand, started to lavish funds on the city of his birth, giving it new superhighways, an airport expansion and growth incentives. Almost overnight, locals say, things went from quite dull to dynamic.
To find the city's best contemporary design, I relied on the lushly illustrated "Chiang Mai Style" and "Lanna Renaissance" by Joe Cummings, a longtime Chiang Mai resident. His books ultimately led me to the Four Seasons Resort Chiang Mai and the new Mandarin Oriental Dhara Dhevi. Both are the stuff of luxury-hotel fantasies, and they have rates to match.
I settled instead into a $50 double at the amiable River View Lodge, which has a small swimming pool, waterfront garden and idiosyncratic collection of Thai tchotchkes, and took the shuttle to the village of Mae Rim, about 20 miles north of town.
It let me out at the Four Seasons entrance, so low-key that it belies the wonders inside. It's set in a veritable botanic park, where a small lake is surrounded by rice paddies, streams, waterfalls and flowering plants.
Designer Ajarn Chulathat Kitibutr evoked a traditional hill country village by incorporating the style known as Lanna, and its signatures are everywhere: wood-plank walkways and bridges with slated railings, buildings raised by stilts, L-shaped verandas shaded by deep eaves, high-pitched, shingled roofs and ornamented gables.
Abacus Design of Bangkok filled the resort with Lanna paintings, tapestry, ceramics, geometric-shaped paper lanterns, gold stenciling and narrative murals. The guest rooms are in pavilions on stilts. They have spacious verandas and are scattered over the 20-acre grounds. The beds are canopied in gauzy white cotton, and the rooms have upholstered rattan furniture and teak cupboards and chests. The result is dreamy but understated, in harmony with the Lanna style, born when Chiang Mai was the capital of the La Na Thai, the land of a million rice fields, almost 700 years ago.
I took it all in on a tour with a staff member, at lunch on a terrace above the infinity pool and during a 60-minute aromatic massage at the resort's award-winning spa, where every artfully carved window panel, lacquered tea tray, exotic flower arrangement and Thai cotton throw is a visual bliss treatment.
A resort among temples
The Mandarin Oriental Dhara Dhevi, which opened in 2004, is in a walled compound on the east side of the city, near the umbrella-making village of Bo Sang and the weaving workshops of San Kamphaeng. The resort was the brainchild of Suchet Suwanmongkol, a successful Thai car dealer. He built himself a house in Chiang Mai, then decided he needed a place where his friends could stay, and Dhara Dhevi was born.
The resort was designed and decorated by a thousand of the region's most accomplished craftspeople. It reflects styles from all the regions that influenced the great Lanna kingdom, including Laos, China and Burma. The 60-acre compound, with its own spire-studded skyline, is meant to resemble a Lanna city. Indeed, some guests leave thinking that the Dhara Dhevi is an ancient city.
From the front gate, you can take a golf cart, pedicab or horse-drawn carriage to the open-air lobby. As you go, wood planks rumble under the wheels of the vehicle; they were built to rattle, evoking old Chiang Mai.
The lobby, under crenellated pagodas, is reached by a magisterial staircase. At the top, you find a long, burnished check-in desk instead of a Buddhist monument, surrounded by sveltely decorated alcoves where it's easy to imagine W. Somerset Maugham or Joseph Conrad nursing a cocktail.
From this perch, you can see the resort's Colonial wing and pool, wrapped around the lobby's west side.
More traditional Lanna design inspired the guest villas, surrounding the resort's rice paddies, where you might see a farmer using a water buffalo. The architecture of the single-story vegetable villas, built around a cottage garden, echoes that of northern Thai rice barns. There is nothing rustic about the interiors, though, with their opulent blend of Thai silks, hill-tribe textiles and custom-designed teak furniture. Some villas have their own serene plunge pools.
Chiang Mai, sprawling well beyond its medieval moat, has no modern mass-transit system. Sidewalks are narrow and cracked. You need courage to cross a busy street. In the inevitable heat, sightseeing tends to be fatiguing but rarely fails to fascinate.
I temple-hopped and toured the Chiang Mai City Arts and Culture Center in a landmark Colonial-era building on the north side of the old town, overlooking Three Kings Monument. One day, I engaged a car and driver to take me up the mountain to Doi Suthep. There, a 300-step staircase leads to a tall, gilded pagoda said to enshrine a revered relic, sometimes identified as Buddha's alms bowl or his ashes or his left leg bone. The temple compound was jammed with pilgrims and tourists lighting incense sticks and leaving lotus blossoms in front of statues of Lord Buddha and the bodhisattvas.
The visual landscape was as enticing as the culinary one. At every turn, makeshift stalls with hot plates and chopping boards offered an enticing array of Thai street food: skewers of barbecued chicken coated in peanut sauce, steaming bowls of spicy noodle soup, ice cream for 10 cents a scoop.
The food and atmosphere were different but equally enchanting at the restaurant in the Chedi Hotel, which is so close to the Ping River that floods delayed its opening in 2005. The hotel has huge, blank exterior walls that hide a showstopping courtyard, with the stunningly restored old British Consulate building as its center of attention. This teak Thai-Victorian blend, built in 1913, now houses the restaurant, which spills onto a candlelit terrace.
The menu features international, Thai and Indian cuisine. I went Indian: pomelo and sweet chili salad, buttered chicken tikka. That was a $50 meal, but prices in Chiang Mai are widely divergent. At most stylish shops, hotels and restaurants, you pay premium prices; everywhere else, it's inexpensive by U.S. standards.
Walking with monks
Chiang Mai's upscale design shops are clustered in three places: Nimmanhaemin Road, Tha Phae Road and along Charoenrat Road in the Wat Ket district, on the east side of the Ping River.
With its mud-brown color and trash-lined banks, the river is no garden spot. But it is fun to cross on the footbridge with saffron-robed monks going to and from the 15th century Ketkaram Temple. Many of Wat Ket's Chinese shop houses and teak wallah mansions have been restored and showcase goods made in traditional ways but updated by contemporary designers. At Sop Moei Arts and Vila Cini, I found Thai silk table runners and pillow covers, fabric and bamboo wall hangings, tasseled lanterns and beautifully woven water hyacinth chairs.
On the way back to central Chiang Mai, I wandered into Ketkaram Temple, a classic Thai Buddhist compound. As I sat down on a bench to cool off, a dozen uniformed schoolboys assembled around a huge bronze gong. When a teacher appeared, they performed a series of prostrations, then began banging on the gong, laughing and chattering until I applauded and they suddenly turned shy.
I took that moment home with me, along with a suitcase full of treasures, including an opium pipe with a slender, tapering handle and a bowl shaped like a flying elephant. At the shop on Tha Phae Road where I got it, the woman said it was definitely antique -- possibly 20 or 40 years old.
It doesn't matter. In Chiang Mai, the old is new, the new old. And, like 1296, this is a very good year.
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