Casa de la Flora, Thailand’s newest design hotel.
On a sunny morning in December 2004, a massive tsunami devastated Indian Ocean coastlines and killed 8,000 people in Thailand. Many lost their lives at the beach resort of Khao Lak. Now, the site has been reborn — as a luxury oasis instead of the backpacker paradise it used to be. Though not everyone is comfortable with its new incarnation, many are filled with hope.
The concrete bungalows open up toward the ocean like blossoms. Only a glass wall and a few dozen meters stand between their occupants and the Indian Ocean. The interiors of the 36 box-like bungalows are a study in straight lines, teak and polished concrete, and each of them is named after a different tropical plant. This one is called Calathea, and it’s part of Casa de la Flora, Thailand’s newest design hotel.
On Dec. 26, 2004, Bungalow B1 of the Sita Garden hotel stood in exactly the same spot where Calathea now stands. B1 was made of brick and only half as big. At the time, it was occupied by a British couple.
It was about 10 a.m., and the ocean’s waters were pulling away from the shore. A vacationer from Munich was the first to realize what was happening. “Tsunami — run, run!” she shouted to the other guests at the Sita Garden before she and her husband sped away on a rented moped.
The wave that rolled over Khao Lak less than a minute later was 10 meters (33 feet) high. It ripped away everything in its path, snapping concrete columns as thick as tree trunks and hurling cars onto the third floors of hotels. “All that was left of the Sita Garden was a hole in the ground,” says Richard Doring, the German travel-guide writer who owned the resort.
Seventeen of the Sita Garden’s 22 guests were able to make it to safety. The man from the British couple staying in B1 gave the woman from Munich the bird when she shouted the warning. He and his wife died at the Sita Garden, as did a father, a young woman from Sweden and an older woman from Switzerland.
A Beach Transformed
On the sunny morning on the day after Christmas, the tsunami killed 8,000 people in Thailand, including more than 500 Germans. The largest number of German vacationers died in Khao Lak. The authorities collected thousands of bodies in the town’s temples, while distraught survivors searched the wreckage for items that had once belonged to their family members.
The 2004 tsunami disaster had a profound effect on many people. It struck the coasts of developing and emerging nations, but it also killed many people from the developed world. Of course, the wave drew no distinctions. Nowhere was this more obvious than in Khao Lak, where the travel giants Thomas Cook and Neckermann had just set up their first hotels.
Even when they were surrounded by only ruins, hoteliers were already asking themselves if the tourists would ever return and, if they did, whether they would they really want to sunbathe on a beach where so many people had died.
Today, there are about as many hotel beds in Khao Lak as there were before the tsunami. Still, the new Khao Lak is trendier, more exclusive and more expensive. The tsunami put an end to what was once a backpacker’s paradise. In the past, as long as there was enough money and demand, hoteliers would have simply built more huts. But now they have either taken things to the next level of comfort and created resorts — or simply gotten out of the business altogether.
Nowadays, at any rate, backpackers will only find cheap bungalows far away from the beachfront, which is now lined with new luxury hotels catering to a new type of guest. Casa de la Flora is the most unusual of the bunch. Michael Gähler, a 43-year-old Swiss national, has been the hotel manager for the last three months, leading it into its first high season. “Our guests are looking for something different,” he says.
In saying “different,” Gähler is hinting at the hotel’s exclusive nature. It bills itself as a stylish and relaxing place offering the maximum amount of privacy. “That’s the style we offer,” Gähler says, adding that the disaster also presented an opportunity. “As bad as the tsunami was,” he says, “it also motivated people to invest.”
Beach Minimalist
Thai businessman Sompong Dowpiset owns the Casa de la Flora. He made his fortune importing bathroom fixtures made by the German company Grohe to Thailand, and then he recognized another way to make money: importing German tourists.
Dowpiset had already opened another luxury hotel, the La Flora, shortly before the tsunami struck. Later on, he bought new land a few hundred meters down the beach and hired the Bangkok architecture firm VaSLab to design and build a modern resort.
The beachfront bungalows made of concrete cubes are the result of that effort. “Our goal was to enable guests to experience their surroundings from the inside out,” says architect Vasu Virajsilp. The concrete interior walls and floors look velvety in the soft light of the tropics. Even the sofas seem to shimmer against a backdrop of varying shades of polished gray concrete.
From the bedroom on the second floor of the Calathea, guests can look directly out over the water from the comfort of their bed. The minimalist design, which features teak, glass and Apple devices, is the product of Bangkok’s Anon Pairot Studio. Every detail, down to the fragrant rice-bran soap, seems to fit together.
Guests at each bungalow can relax around their own granite-tiled pool. But Gähler also plans to build a lounge on the roof of the restaurant, where guests will be able to sip Tom Kha cocktails, listen to music and watch the sun set over the Andaman Sea. Speedboats will dock at a floating pier to take guests on private outings to dramatic cliffs as well as on diving excursions.
From Ruins to Riches
Gähler doesn’t think it’s a contradiction to construct such a beautiful environment on the site of a horrific natural disaster. In fact, he says he believes that the history of Khao Lak gives vacationers a special relationship to the place.
It is just this kind of special relationship that Richard Doring has always wanted to create — but of a slightly different kind. Since coming to Khao Lak in the 1980s and building the Sita Garden bungalow hotel, he has dreamed of bringing tourists and Thais together.
After the tsunami destroyed the Sita Garden, he started a project to help local residents cope with the traumatic event. He set up a system of bungalow sponsorships, in which individual vacationers could lend local developers €10,000 over a 10-year period. In return, they would be entitled to use their bungalow for free 14 days a year.
“We have achieved 10 percent of what we wanted,” he says. Doring built a new Sita Garden on the beach a few hundred meters to the south, and he also operates a new website advertising attractions in southern Thailand. Still, he admits that many other owners of small hotels simply had to give up after the tsunami. “The whole budget tourism industry is gone,” he says.
As far as Doring sees it, the Casa de la Flora doesn’t at all fit in at Khao Lak. Its “bunker-like rabbit hutches” are some of the “ugliest things I’ve ever seen,” he says. For him, the beauty of Khao Lak lay in the individual travelers who were interested in nature and culture, the former backpackers who had become doctors and actors and relaxed in the simple bungalows within “Mai’s Quiet Zone” remembering days gone by.
The tsunami erased Mai’s Quiet Zone forever. The Sofitel, which stood in ruins for years, reopened as a new hotel a year ago. The hotel had become a symbol of the catastrophe because more guests — a total of 186 — died there than in any other hotel. Now it has been rebuilt to look almost exactly like the former hotel but under a new name, the five-star Marriott Hotel.
Source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,795876,00.html
