Keep Calm And Drink Tea

A Chiang Mai heritage estate gets new life as a teahouse and tea retail space.

- Michele Koh Morollo

Kaomai Tea Barn in Sanpatong, Chiang Mai is a 210 sqm adaptive-reuse conservation project that’s part of a commercial masterplan to revitalise a former tobacco processing estate through a series of likeminded projects on the site. In 2018, Kaomai Estate 1955 won a UNESCO Asia-Pacific Award for Cultural Heritage Conservation in New Design in Heritage Contexts. Designed by Bangkok-based PAVA Architects, the tea barn’s remodel respects its surrounding landscape and ecology, as well as other heritage buildings within the estate.

A sunken ground level

Kaomai Estate’s brief was to turn one of their former tobacco drying barns into a tea house where visitors can enjoy brews made from locally harvested tea leaves and flowers in a historical building. PAVA Architects’ principals, Varat Limwibul and Pacharapan Ratananakorn, responded with a reconstruction technique that honoured the barn’s original architecture while proposing a sunken space on the ground floor.

“We restored the old barn but altered the ground floor by sinking the space to highlight the high ceilings and volume of the barn. This also enabled us to connect the main avenue of the estate to an amphitheatre, and to create a charming teahouse and shop surrounded by verdant nature,” says Ratananakorn. “It’s a very simple plan separated into indoor and semi-outdoor zones, that is ideal for tea-drinking experiences,” she adds.