Onion is an architecture and interior design firm from Bangkok, Thailand directed by Arisara Chaktranon and Siriyot Chaiamnuay. The pair describes their work as modern, unexpected and memorable.
Last year they completed a project with the Sala Resort group in Pratu Chai, Ayutthaya for a luxury hotel with curving brick walls rising high over tight, narrow corridors. They create a feeling of the immense when one walks through them, leaving only a view of the sky and of an ornate door the studio designed. Step decks for lounging along the waterfront serve another function that is both picturesque and practical: they are meant to flood when the Chao Phraya River rises.
The designers told ArchDaily:
“Sala Ayutthaya is the twenty-six-room boutique hotel, right across a most picturesque site of the old capital of Thailand along the Chao Phraya River. Phutthai Sawan Temple was built in 1353 AD by the first monarch of Ayutthaya Kingdom. It becomes the view of the restaurant and the riverfront suites at Sala. The main entry of Sala is next to a Sala Tree on U-thong Road. It is a single iron door on a long brick facade, leading us to the low wooden ceiling reception and the double volume art gallery. Within this space, the dominant feature is an antique wooden door that Onion designs the framing for. It is placed between the transparent mirrors, opening to the exterior courtyard, narrowed by the paralleled brick walls of multi-curved geometries. They frame the image of the sky. What is unique about this main circulation is the constantly changing shadows. The curved shadows from the two sides normally meet on the floor at about eleven o’ clock in the morning. They transform the atmosphere of the space at different times of the day.”
The resort complex boasts a view of the river and the Putthai Sawan Temple along its riverfront decks. The brick in the courtyard gives way here to a white facade of the residences in the compound. Each vantage point within the resort has an outdoor space as its focus, be it the sky in the courtyard, the view of the temple, or the river which runs so close to the hotel it may as well book a room.
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Click to see a larger image. Photographs by Wilson Tungthunya.
Especially interesting is the play of light and shadow and the narrowness of the passageway, which if it weren’t for the light pouring in from above, would be so confining. Also like the concept of the shadows meeting each other at 11:00 am, and wonder if that’s true the year round and is that because of its proximity to the equator. Really exciting architecture.