Inside Bill Bensley’s exuberant Bangkok retreat
Too much is never enough in the fantastical world of hotel designer Bill Bensley, whose bungalow in Bangkok is the ultimate tropical – and sustainable – stay.
Catch the drift with slow, sustainable travel in the latest edition of Travel + Luxury, available to digital subscribers now.
Too much is never enough in the exuberant world of Bill Bensley. For almost four decades, this enterprising architect, interiors whiz and landscape guru has hatched well-known retreats in Southeast Asia, including Capella Ubud in Bali, Shinta Mani Wild in Cambodia and Rosewood Luang Prabang in Laos, all of which mix his trademark theatricality with devout sustainability. These positive-impact lodgings share a reverence for unbridled nature, community connection, and wildly orchidaceous style. But nowhere is the designer’s affinity for tropical maximalism more evident than at his Bangkok bungalow.
At Baan Botanica, a three-bedroom abode tucked away in a tiny soi (side street) in bustling Sukhumvit, Bensley’s habitual enthusiasm for collecting, curating and upcycling is on bravura display. The decor is a fantastical bricolage of colour, pattern and magpie eclecticism.
Everywhere you turn are vignettes composed of lush foliage, decorative objects, vivid artworks and what he would deem “conversation starters” plucked from around the globe. African carvings, Bolivian textiles, Indian chandeliers, and Irish statuary along with bibelots amassed from all over Asia. His design wizardry extends to elevating bric-à-brac from the local Chatuchak Market, too. It all hums with verve.
Along with his husband, Jirachai Rengthong, and their six rambunctious Jack Russells – Jesse James, Chuck Berry, Bobby Brown, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, and Tommy Bahama – Bensley arrived at the residence in 1997. Previously, they lived around the corner in a butterfly-roofed house with low ceilings that the towering designer would invariably collide with.
“We started to renovate right after we moved in, and we’ve not stopped changing it,” he tells me. Nothing is fixed immutably and the impermanence of the vibrant tableaux keep friends guessing (and marvelling). “We always use the excuse of ‘professional experimentation’ to renovate. We repaint at the drop of a hat and change an entire scheme because of a recent painting acquisition.”
Ultimately, the home is a mad laboratory for Bensley, a place where he can dabble with his preoccupations and prototypes. A 1930s Vietnamese bamboo hat, for instance, informed the look of Hotel de la Coupole in Sapa, Vietnam, which is chock-a-block with dressmaking paraphernalia. The globetrotting couple have been acquiring unique objects for many years. In the two-storey main house, which includes a wraparound veranda arrayed with greenery, each room conveys the air of a cabinet de curiosités. A bed base in one of the suites is made from a repurposed pool table.
In another, the heraldic headboard was retrieved from an embassy in Yangon. One of the bathrooms is a shrine to forays in Africa and India, with masks and statues from Benin, Yoruba, Congo and South Africa, door frames from Rajasthan, and speakers that play avian symphonies.
“A really interesting home for me,” Bensley explains, “is one that takes several days to see all the corners,
all the odds and ends, and even then you’re not quite done.”
Baan Botanica is overflowing with liveliness, especially in the garden’s dazzling installations, which include fountains, pavilions and pagodas, as well as more than 1,500 species of plants. The hot-house setting is ideal for Rengthong, a master horticulturist with a penchant for floral alchemy.
“Last year Jirachai came up with the gorgeous idea of a bromeliad fountain, which I was besotted with,” says Bensley. The poetic notion of cascading flowering plants in shades of red, orange and yellow is being replicated in The Sukhothai in Bangkok. More recently, the pair added Medusa-like wigs of tumbling succulents to a row of antique male mannequins. “I wonder which project that will pop up in,” Bensley adds.
Bensley, an American expatriate with an unfailingly optimistic disposition, relocated from California to Asia in the early 1980s. After brief stints in Singapore and Hong Kong, he flitted to Bangkok and launched his namesake design studio out of a parking garage in 1990. Between offices in Bangkok and Bali, he now employs 150 people and oversees eco-sensitive projects for big-league hotel groups.
One of his mottos in Thai is Mai mun mai tum, “If it’s not fun, don’t do it”, and he works and abides by that jaunty sentiment. A forthcoming book, More Escapism (Thames & Hudson), is a spirited ode to his last dozen projects. “Why do hotels have to be so serious?” he writes. All his properties are animated by irreverent backstories and elaborate scripts. “I live by the idea that a hotel, like a movie, has a plot that makes it worth watching more than once.”
The pandemic grounded the wayfaring designer, who has taken up painting large-scale figurative images and selling them to raise funds for community and conservation projects close to his heart; one of them is a non-profit group that seeks to halt illegal logging and wildlife poaching in Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains. On the drawing board are a JW Marriott resort in Jeju, South Korea, an art-filled hotel in Barcelona, and a property in China inspired by “a runaway Cuban mafiosi”.
Later this year will see the debut of the InterContinental Khao Yai in northeastern Thailand. The retreat will feature 16 heritage train cars repurposed as ritzy suites. “Everything is being custom-made to fit their precise dimensions,” he says. “Some of the guest rooms will have their own deck or even a pool, and there will also be a bar carriage and a spa.”
At the same time it’s full steam ahead on the couple’s next home in Chiang Mai. Will it have the layered and luscious ambience of Baan Botanica? “It is just a beautiful plot of land in the mountains and a pile of architectural drawings right now,” he says. As in all his hotel projects, sensitively constructed around existing trees, Bensley is loath to remove a single sapling. “We will be keeping all the trees and planting many more.”
The file of rococo art, upcycled items and vintage collectables for the new abode is expanding by the day. Avid entertainers, the pair excel at baroque table arrangements, and you can only imagine what they will cook up for their house-warming soirée. It’s enough to give the Marie Kondo’s of the world heart palpitations. “I laugh at the idea of minimalism,” says Bensley. “It’s a good excuse to go on a shopping spree holiday.”
Follow @travelandluxury on Instagram for travel inspiration and exclusive content.