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- VOL. 12.2
La Gritta: Fine Dining by the Sea
The Cliff: The Freshest of Fresh
A Cool Million for a Piece of the Hottest Beach
Laguna Phuket Keeps on Selling – It’s So Easy
Look Who’s Here to Play… Superyachts
Kanna-style homes take one to two years of nurturing each, a standard she seems in no hurry to change. Each house is distinctive, but common design elements include the Thai-Balinese roofs, balconies protruding into the surrounding green, and natural materials that bind the parts into one artfully composed whole.
Like the haphazard natural scheme that gives life to the estate’s living inhabitants, Kanna’s master plan is entirely organic. When her passion for one home nears fruition, her gaze moves to the contours of a new nook in her land, and ideas germinate. Thai-style salas take on Balinese roofs and fuse with contemporary balconies, the lines of which match hill contours from which natural stone walls project; wood-panelled walls blend with rock and tile… And from her fertile imagination emerge the lines of a new house.
Listening to Khun Kanna talk, one can almost hear the start-and-stop hum of the creative process. New ideas spark while she talks, and occasional pauses in the flow of words suggest she’s squirreling away new ideas even as she stumbles across them.
Building houses on Phuket – “growing” them – was not Kanna’s original plan. She was a Bangkok girl who studied accounting and then went to work for a Japanese car company. All of it very normal. There was no family history in the construction business. Until she took a holiday on Phuket in 1988, there had been no self-generated direction in her life. But on Phuket she immediately fell in love, swept away by the natural green corners of the island still unconsumed by rubber plantations. She herself was soon consumed with passion for her own secret garden.
In Bangkok, Kanna’s life had been buried by family expectations, accounting and cars. On Phuket, her first job allowed hidden seeds of creativity to germinate. She began decorating condominiums for other people. Then, not long after moving to the island, Kanna found her secret garden down a tiny road on Patong’s southern headland. A green gully sloping down to the ocean had survived the forest-devouring rubber plantations. Part of it was under coconut and sator trees, but many large forest trees remained on the lower edge. In terms of atmosphere, this spot was about as far from the Patong Beach most people know as one could imagine. “Now,” says Kanna with a smile, “when I tell people I live in Patong they take a second, strange look at me.”
Kanna’s first house was her own. Her vision of a place in which to live was a distant dream away from the boxy concrete structures that jam Thailand’s modern estates. Her house snuggles between the trees, a magnificent ocean view visible through green jungle. The home is broken up into entirely separate structures, requiring a garden stroll from bedroom to living room, something entirely radical for a modern Thai. While the traditional Thai house also uses separate structures for different purposes, they are always closely interlinked by a raised deck, and they generally look inwards. Each of the three structures in Kanna’s house is backed by garden, linked with footpaths, and has balconies reaching out to the sea.
The garden, one might say, sits right in the middle of her home. Rocks protrude into her bathroom and the spare bedroom – huge rocks on which one can sit or lie down. In comparison, the more traditional-looking dining room stands high at the back of the other buildings, overlooking Thai-style rooftops, garden and pool through three glass walls. There’s a double kitchen – one sparse, in the traditional Thai style, and the other modern Western and cluttered with all conveniences. The roof shingles are teak from the north of Thailand, the first house done this way on Phuket, she says. “So many people have copied my ideas. But many of them won’t spend the money to do things really well, and the results don’t come out the same. Personally, I don’t like looking at other peoples’ projects. I don’t want them thinking that I’ve copied their ideas.”
The details that one doesn’t see say even more about this unusual lady’s principles. The electric wires, for instance. You don’t see any. Kanna looks around, making a careful survey of her green little world. “You don’t see anything that hurts the eye,” she says with obvious satisfaction. “When people come to buy my houses they must agree not to hang any washing out in the open. It destroys the natural atmosphere. And the electric department – I’m always fighting with them. As soon as the wires reach my land they have to go underground and out of sight. The electric workers don’t like that. They just don’t care about preserving the natural beauty.” No air-conditioning compressors are visible. No satellite dishes. They’re there, for Kanna appreciates the good things of modern life. But, like all things that “hurt the eye”, they’re hidden.
Kanna’s own house was completed in 1994, but the creative process had inspired her to the extent she simply couldn’t stop. Her imagination next focused on an adjoining piece of land, and an entirely different home-creature was born. Kanna dreamed another home, and then consulted her favourite architect, asking him to translate the dream into a practicable design.
Natural-modern contrasts abound in her houses, where you might get a gnarled tree branch for a doorknob right next to hi-tech German fittings. Surprising things found in the surrounding forest complement others discovered in the stores of Paris or Berlin, where Kanna also likes to hunt.
“Most people don’t think a girl can handle this kind of construction business, especially alone,” says Kanna.
But it seems she’s still thinking of years gone by, for today her name is well-known in the world of housing developers. Even if she really isn’t one herself. Kanna doesn’t develop homes, she grows them.