The Willow
Cloud
Live life as a Masterpiece
Client
Khun Pratanporn
Year
2026
Location
Bangkok, Thailand
“A main residence conceived as the centre of its owner's artistic world where every ceiling is a different painting, every room a different depth of nature, and the willow tree presides over all of it as the emblem of poetry in space.”
PRIVATE RESIDENCE
RECEPTION AREA
Live Life as a Masterpiece
This house begins with a belief held across all three of this owner's homes: that life is a work of art, and a home should be its canvas. Here, that belief reaches its fullest expression. Each room carries its own painted ceiling—willow branches sweeping across the living vault, a constellation map pressed into plaster above the bed, tropical palms drawn in ink on the powder room walls, and the entire entrance corridor alive with rabbits, dragonflies, and botanical creatures in relief. Nothing is left plain, nothing without intention.
The willow tree was chosen for its character, not its beauty—it is the tree of reflection and poetry, its trailing branches reaching as if in the act of drawing. In the cloud above, it speaks of light; seen through low arches, frame-like windows, it is luminous. Together they give this house its temperament: untamed, contemplative, filled with the kind of attention to detail that belongs only to someone who loves the world deeply and has decided to live inside that love.
THE CORRIDOR TO LIVING ROOM
The Glass House
The living room is conceived as a glass house within the house—a space where the architecture disappears and only the willow remains. Painted willow branches sweep across the vaulted ceiling panels, trailing downward as if the room were set inside a grove and the canopy had closed overhead.
Carving an archway frame around each opening, and arched pieces from the owner's personal collection of antique architectural elements, integrated into the structure so that the room feels less built than assembled from beautiful things found over a lifetime. On one side, a 9-meter bookshelf houses rare architectural books—because in a house conceived as a work of art, books are a part of the architecture.
“In a Ghibli film, there is always one moment when the camera simply holds still and lets the world be beautiful. This house is built on that same conviction: that beauty, given enough space and enough attention, becomes the truest form of comfort.”
The wine cellar is the only room in the house that looks backward toward the medieval, the subterranean, the candlelit. Its barrel vault is stone-warm. Arched niches carved into the walls display bottles in rows, backlit and dark. The sconces are hands holding globes of light aloft, as if torchbearers standing in a vaulted passage. Plants trail from above.
The floor is herringbone brick edged in blue. At the far end, a mirror doubles the corridor into infinity. It is a room that smells of wood and quiet, and rewards the kind of person who keeps beautiful things in the dark and brings them out for people who understand them.
The Submarine Room
The working room carries the concept of the submarine—the icon war to the owner, mirror in her Bangkok apartment, brought into the heart of the main house as a private chamber of focus. The ceiling is framed with large rectangular panels framed in aged brass, their rounded corners use a heavily nautical character, as if above the surface the sky moves and one sees it only through the vessel's hull. The walls are a deep lapis lazuli blue, dense and pressurized. Arched display cabinets hold objects chosen with care. Four chairs arrange around a low table at the room's centre; this is where the work happens, insulated from the house, from the city, from the noise at the surface, world at the particular clarity that only depth provides.
A ROOM BENEATH THE SURFACE
The Master Bedroom
beyond the CLOUD
“Where the sea is at its most quiet, its most blue.”
The master bedroom is conceived as the sky itself, a room where every surface carries the language of the heavens. The barrel vault above the bed is painted deep navy and mapped with constellations: hand-rendered stars, celestial lines, and sky symbols pressed into the curved plaster as if the ceiling were the underside of the night. Sky elements continue into the detail: the floor pattern echoes the geometry of star charts, the arch of the headboard mirrors the dome of the horizon. To sleep here is to sleep inside the idea of the open sky infinite, quiet, and entirely without ceiling.
MASTER BEDROOM — OPEN TO THE STARS
The Tidal Room
“Azul Bahia & Checkerboard”
The master bathroom carries the marble blue of the ocean into an entirely different register: here it alternates with solid bands of cream marble, creating a dramatic, deep and commanding, checkered pattern wall, columns, and floor in shifting rhythms. Blue-and-white shadow-boxing mosaic tiles run at shoulder height, and across the floor, a custom-carved stone basin that stops you. The oak vanity sits in a recessed nook with studded brass rivets on its frame, a scalloped mirror frame, and glass sconces on either side. The room is simultaneously theatrical and completely original: a bathroom you would remember.
MASTER BATHROOM
Two rooms devoted to the objects of a considered life: The master closet frames every garment in panels of Azul Bahia, a deep, rich blue that turns the act of choosing what to wear into a jewel box ritual. A porthole skylight opens the room to the sky above. In the adjacent room, honey-oak shelving arches from floor to ceiling in a quiet colonnade of shoes and bags, lit warmly from within, with a botanical-print ottoman at the centre for sitting and deliberating.
The Root Chamber
The entertainment room is a secret chamber, the root of the willow tree, with its vast tangle of roots beneath the earth, could conceal. The concept is the hidden space under the main residence, sheltered, alive with organic geometry. The barrel vault ceiling is painted in deep blue-green of underwater ground water, its structural ribs rendered in dark carved oak that field extend horizontally across the ceiling. At the centre of this vault hangs a brass chandelier, an organic form of spiraling tendrils that glows as if it were a root illuminated from within. The room is executed in the Ghibli manner: vibrant in colour, rich in mechanical detail, and filled with the particular kind of magic that belongs only to spaces crafted by people who refuse to grow up.
Each Room as an Own World
The house refuses a single overarching aesthetic. Every room—the Root Chamber beneath the earth, the Submarine, the Master Suite, the Tidal Bathroom, the Glass House—is its own independent world, unified not by repeating materials but by a commitment to storytelling.
The Owner's Antique Architecture
The carved wooden elements throughout the house are the owner's personal collection of genuine antique architectural fragments acquired over many years. SIWA integrated them structurally into the space so that the house feels lived-in, layered, and authentic.
The Ghibli Method Applied
Double-curved ceiling details, vibrant colors, mechanical details, and ceiling murals have been considered as architectural choices in the Root Chamber, Submarine, and Master Suite. The ceiling becomes a narrative canvas, creating an atmosphere removed from ordinary life.
The Barrel Arch as the House's Grammar
Every major room is vaulted: the entrance corridor, the living room, the bedroom, the wine cellar, the play room. The barrel profile recurring throughout gives structural cohesion that unites all the different worlds within their day-to-day rhythm.
Project
The Willow Cloud
Location
Bangkok, Thailand
Client
Khun Pratanporn