Location: Chiang Mai, Thailand

Design Team: EKAR Architects

Area: 455 m²

Year: 2023

Photography: Rungkit Chareonwat

Design Features: The Sayla Hotel occupies the former Baan Sayla guesthouse in Chiang Mai's Nimman district. EKAR Architects approached the 455 m² renovation without adding rooms or floor area. Instead, the project reorganises the relationship between street, courtyards, stairs and guestrooms, responding to the fragility that intensive tourism and the pandemic had exposed. A sealed lobby gives way to a more gradual arrival, bringing traces of Nimman's earlier communal life into the everyday experience of the hotel.

The defining move is a continuous curved brick wall. At ground level it turns inward from the pavement, drawing views and movement into a public court. Across the second and third floors, the same surface wraps the guestrooms, balancing privacy with carefully placed openings, daylight and ventilation. Three linked courtyards mediate between street activity, shared seating and a bar deeper inside, allowing the degree of enclosure to increase as one moves through the building.

Within the project's narrative, Sayla can mean beauty, a tree and, most importantly, a mountain. Red bricks sourced from kilns in Lampang, Lamphun and Chiang Mai retain subtle variations in colour and form. They recall the material presence of Chiang Mai's old fortifications while giving the hotel the weight of a small mountain set within the neighbourhood. Beside the central court, a south-facing stair opens towards Doi Suthep; the view expands as guests climb, turning ascent into an architectural reading of the name.

Brick carries environmental and experiential work as well as symbolism. Curving walls filter views from the street, move air through openings and soften strong daylight through reflection. Exposed masonry and black metal stairs meet warmer timber surfaces in bars, library and rooms, shifting the tactile register from rough to intimate. Retained beams, open voids and new walls remain legible together, allowing the building's history to survive the renovation rather than disappear behind a uniform finish.

The Sayla Hotel addresses renewal in a tourist district through restraint. It neither reproduces Lanna ornament nor treats local identity as a decorative theme. Local brick, courtyard life and a vertical route oriented towards the mountain establish a more durable connection among guests, climate, street and community memory. The result is not a resort detached from Nimman, but a measured passage from a busy urban frontage into a quieter shared interior.

Design Team: EKAR Architects is a Bangkok-based practice led by architect Ekaphap Duangkaew. The studio treats architecture as a field of research between art and science, drawing spatial logic from nature, society, culture, behaviour and time while balancing aesthetic experience with everyday use. Its work spans residential, hospitality, commercial and cultural projects, often building a sense of place through local materials, climate response and close observation of how people live. Duangkaew served as lead architect for The Sayla Hotel, with Tirayon Khunpukdee on the design team; the project was shortlisted in the Hotel and Creative Re-use categories at the 2023 World Architecture Festival.