An infusion of beauty
In the morning we take the scooter back to Bantawai village, where after a mediocre little breakfast but good coffee at a strange garden spouting artificial mist and concrete waterfalls, we are directed to the DeSiam Warehouse.
The "warehouse" is a manicured five hectares of lush fig-trees and ticking irrigation-sprays misting the grass in long arcs. There are Chinese lacquer trunks, and pagodas, and hundreds upon hundred of doors. There are more than a dozen rice-barns, carried off from obsolete village farms and reassembled in a gentle crescent along another expanse of lawn. There is a five-carriage train without its engine, its insides rusted in beautiful patterns.
But more magical still is Golden Triangle Antiques. To call it a furniture store, as Google does, is a wholly inadequate description.
The owner's uncle has built a poured-concrete hall in the Moroccan style, the smooth fifty-foot walls pierced only by graceful, narrow archways at ground level and a ring of shuttered windows high, high up. Through the arches are secondary walls of thin brick, and beautiful wooden doorways, doorways set within doorways, like a vast Matryoshka set.
The weathered patina of the wood takes my breath away. Plants flourish at pleasing intervals. Stone urns filled with water sprout a layer of tiny, vivid water-plants. On one bench, a smoke-grey cat the precise shade of the age-silvered wood grooms two immaculate kittens.
We spend an hour walking, entranced, through the arrangements inside. The owner has married Indian posts with Chinese panels and Balinese lintels. He has made walls of old wooden brick-moulds, surprising positives of negative space. He has transported complete facades from houses in Rajasthan and reassembled them here.
It is like receiving an infusion of beauty. We find ourselves thanking and thanking the owner profusely, as we discover each new vista.
But more magical still is Golden Triangle Antiques. To call it a furniture store, as Google does, is a wholly inadequate description.
The owner's uncle has built a poured-concrete hall in the Moroccan style, the smooth fifty-foot walls pierced only by graceful, narrow archways at ground level and a ring of shuttered windows high, high up. Through the arches are secondary walls of thin brick, and beautiful wooden doorways, doorways set within doorways, like a vast Matryoshka set.
The weathered patina of the wood takes my breath away. Plants flourish at pleasing intervals. Stone urns filled with water sprout a layer of tiny, vivid water-plants. On one bench, a smoke-grey cat the precise shade of the age-silvered wood grooms two immaculate kittens.
We spend an hour walking, entranced, through the arrangements inside. The owner has married Indian posts with Chinese panels and Balinese lintels. He has made walls of old wooden brick-moulds, surprising positives of negative space. He has transported complete facades from houses in Rajasthan and reassembled them here.
It is like receiving an infusion of beauty. We find ourselves thanking and thanking the owner profusely, as we discover each new vista.
*
Back at the homestay, our host is fitting more 5,000-degree bulbs in the garden lighting. The small black cat we have been coaxing out with food is nowhere to be found.
I have one more surprise, I tell S, after we have showered. We phut-phut back through the darkened farming villages south of Nam Phrae, unlit road after unlit road, not even a neon-lit home-restaurant blinking in the night.
Are you sure it's here? S asks.
I am. And it is: up a white curved path through a combed gravel garden set off by dark-leafed plants, the neatly-trimmed outlines of the Saiun Bistro, where in a pared-back room with a high ceiling we are the only guests. The owner has put his favourites on the menu: not restaurant food but comfort food, the things people cook for themselves at home, alongside anything he feels like from French picnic fare. Seasoned soft-boiled egg with miso and mirin. Chicken liver pate and washed-rind brie. Amberjack carpaccio like butter in our mouths. And sake after sake after sake.
Back at the homestay, our host is fitting more 5,000-degree bulbs in the garden lighting. The small black cat we have been coaxing out with food is nowhere to be found.
I have one more surprise, I tell S, after we have showered. We phut-phut back through the darkened farming villages south of Nam Phrae, unlit road after unlit road, not even a neon-lit home-restaurant blinking in the night.
Are you sure it's here? S asks.
I am. And it is: up a white curved path through a combed gravel garden set off by dark-leafed plants, the neatly-trimmed outlines of the Saiun Bistro, where in a pared-back room with a high ceiling we are the only guests. The owner has put his favourites on the menu: not restaurant food but comfort food, the things people cook for themselves at home, alongside anything he feels like from French picnic fare. Seasoned soft-boiled egg with miso and mirin. Chicken liver pate and washed-rind brie. Amberjack carpaccio like butter in our mouths. And sake after sake after sake.
Did you know there was such a thing as a sparkling sake? I ask S.
When we leave, the night seems even quieter. We are soon back on the slab-concrete paths through the ticking paddy fields, past the row after row of unlit houses. The highway is its usual bleak and cracked expanse. We drive the wrong way up the hard shoulder, down the unmarked lane, through the tangle of telephone wires and signage and shuttered food-stalls, the world and all its imperfections surrounding us once again, until there is only the memory of the little house glowing warm behind us, like a lamp under glass in the cool night air.
When we leave, the night seems even quieter. We are soon back on the slab-concrete paths through the ticking paddy fields, past the row after row of unlit houses. The highway is its usual bleak and cracked expanse. We drive the wrong way up the hard shoulder, down the unmarked lane, through the tangle of telephone wires and signage and shuttered food-stalls, the world and all its imperfections surrounding us once again, until there is only the memory of the little house glowing warm behind us, like a lamp under glass in the cool night air.
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