The backstory
Wanting on the moss-covered railroad tracks slicing via the property, you’d virtually consider an precise prepare as soon as handed via right here. And the foyer, constructed like an old-timey ticketing sales space and a station masters’ sleeping quarters, appear to have been right here for ages. But it surely’s all make-believe: Impressed by the (actual) Nineteenth-century Pak Chong Railway station close by, Bangkok-based lodge designer Invoice Bensley flexed his artistic muscle and drew up a narrative round Southeast Asia’s grand railroad journeys of yore. He masterfully blends reality with fiction, from the made-up protagonist Khun Somsak, an area prepare conductor and railway fanatic who used his financial savings to fee the lodge’s Rama V-era structure, to the precise backstories of the upcycled railway carts which have been saved from junkyards across the nation.
Hall at InterContinental Khao Yai Resort
The rooms
It’s the suites you’ll need to e-book. Set inside a garden-fringed enclave behind the resort, these may simply be a few of the most unusual lodging in all of Thailand. Every one takes over an upcycled classic railway carriage, which suggests their ground plan spans a reasonably awkward 2.5 by 30 metres. Nonetheless, Bensley and his staff managed to show them into comfortable suites, with slim marble-clad bathe cabins, ceiling-mounted baggage racks, and futon-like beds on a barely raised platform on the cabin’s ends. Inside-wise, they draw inspiration from totally different Asian railway journeys: some function swirling wood-carved headboards from Cambodia, and others are furnished with kaleidoscopic Laotian silk weavings and ceramics. Whereas all open to canvas-shaded patios with out of doors roll-top tubs and lounge nooks, solely a handful include a non-public swimming pool.
However even the usual rooms, unfold over three gingerbread-trimmed buildings circling the lake, ship the railway fantasy. Modelled after prepare cabins with clerestory ceilings and pleather lounge cubicles, they vary from comfortable cabins with black-and-white panelling and bogs clad in monochrome marble to all-teak numbers with tromp de l’oeil home windows searching over hand-painted jungle scenes. One other perk: full-sized Byredo toiletries within the bogs that odor heavenly of lemon and marigold.
