Inside designer Bill Bensley’s private Chiang Mai estate, now available for private bookings

When asked to explain why his private estate in Chiang Mai looks nothing like Northern Thailand, Bill Bensley said, “Hacienda Botanica is our home, not a client brief and, therefore, it is allowed to be a little unreasonable. If private houses cannot misbehave, what hope is there for mankind?”

The line is delivered with the breezy certainty of someone who has designed more than 200 hotels, resorts and private residences across 30 countries and thus earned the right to an opinion. But it also, rather precisely, explains Hacienda Botanica – 16 hectares of Mexican fever dream along the eastern banks of the Mae Rim River, less than an hour north of Chiang Mai and now, for the first time, available for private stays through luxury travel company Smiling Albino.

The estate is the Bangkok-based American designer’s country manse to Baan Botanica, his storied Bangkok residence. Long before a single column was raised, Bensley and Jirachai Rengthong, a horticulturist and the botanical intelligence behind both properties, spent years acquiring antique materials across the region – columns, doors, windows, floors, ceilings and architectural fragments – in anticipation of a site they had not yet found.

They considered around 30 potential plots. Then one day, about 10 years ago, they saw this 16-hectare site. The land had a long farming history, with a 100-year-old forest running through it. Two small areas hold Buddhist temple history stretching back more than two centuries. And then, slipping through the property with pleasing insouciance, the Mae Rim River, a tributary of the Ping River.

In short, a property with water, mountains, forest, memory, and what Bensley describes as “just enough mystery to make the sensible part of one’s brain surrender immediately.” The decision to buy took approximately five seconds. “That is often how the best decisions happen, before common sense has had time to put on its shoes.”

The choice of Mae Rim over somewhere nearer Chiang Mai city was deliberate. Bensley and Rengthong have lived in Bangkok for 40 years; the last thing they wanted was “another city pretending to be a retreat.” From Hacienda Botanica, it is difficult to see another house. The 50-metre pool lies mirror-flat in the foreground, flanked by towering royal palms and coconut palms so tall and dense they swallow the buildings behind them. “It feels wonderfully removed,” Bensley said, “without being theatrically remote.”

The stylistic decision to build a hacienda in Thailand requires, if not justification, at least an explanation. Bensley and Rengthong visit Mexico often – “it’s our happy place,” he said – and their love of its architecture runs deep: the confidence of its colour, the layered history, the climate logic of thick walls, deep verandahs, courtyard planting, and an attitude toward sunlight that prefers to keep it politely outside. In other words, the hacienda and the tropical Thai house are structural cousins.

The 11 bedrooms are spread across villas and riverfront casitas, arranged in a semi-circle facing the mountains and what Bensley calls “the magnificent orange sunsets.” He is particular about orientation. “I like buildings to know what they are looking at. These ones are not confused.”

The Mexican confidence is flagrant. One of the pool pavilions is painted in a cobalt blue so saturated it’s breathtaking. Three wide arches frame the interior, white detailing picks out the curves, a decorative pediment in peacock teal sits above the central opening, and two monumental blue-and-white ceramic urns stand sentinel at the steps. Elsewhere, ochre walls glow through the palms. If you’re looking for a palette of coordinated neutrals, this hacienda isn’t it.

More than 200 antique columns, doors, windows, wall panels and architectural fragments are woven into the structures, much of it sourced from Mexico, the rest chosen because it tells, Bensley remarked, “a good Mexican story.” His distaste for imitation patina is emphatic. “I like materials that have had a previous life. They come with ghosts, scratches, cigar burns, bad manners, and much better conversation.”

Ceilings soar. The main sitting room rises well above picture-rail height, its walls in warm raw sienna plaster hung with large canvases: one in rust and umber abstraction, another an exuberant explosion of tropical palms and botanical forms in orange, green and red. A crystal chandelier hangs at the centre. Dark hardwood floors throughout. Against one wall, a long ebony sideboard layered with ceramic vessels, a sculptural lion and more art. The seating – carved timber armchairs in tapestry fabric, a deep sofa stacked with mustard cushions, a geometric rug in saffron and crimson – reads less like a curated interior than a life accumulated with great appetite and taste. A teal arched door offers a glimpse of the gardens beyond, as if the outside is quietly waiting to be let back in.

The gardens are Rengthong’s domain, shaped over a decade with what Bensley cheerfully describes as “terrifying precision and great love.” Head gardener Ouant, formerly of Four Seasons Chiang Mai and known to the couple for three decades, oversees 12 gardeners with rigour and warmth.

At every turn is evidence of a horticulturist given 16 hectares and no restraining orders. Which explains the hidden gardens, surprise spaces and a sunken rock garden. Traveller’s palms fan out dramatically behind the pavilions; royal palms and coconut palms line the water’s edge in stands thick enough to screen the world.

The dry house – Bensley’s favourite space – is a Victorianate-ribbed iron-and-glass greenhouse, but one that’s open on the sides so the breeze moves freely through its interior of bromeliads in scarlet and green, hanging dendrobium orchids, acid-yellow tropical foliage and cacti that would otherwise sulk through the wet season. The whole scheme is “practical, beautiful, and slightly mad,” said Bensley cheerfully. “An excellent combination.”

As to why he and Rengthong have now decided to rent out the hacienda to paying guests, Bensley is characteristically candid. “[Having built so many hotels], I am increasingly a hotelier. I need to learn the ropes, preferably before tying myself in knots with an actual hotel.”

Occupancy permitting, Bensley returns twice a month: running with his four Jack Russells in the mountains each morning, painting in his studio at the estate’s quietest northern end, listening to a silence that, in his words, “has texture.” Bangkok is full of urgency. Hacienda Botanica is full of birds, dogs, river, mountains, plants, old stone and old wood – a deeply personal world that, until recently, belonged only to its makers. The difference now is that you can book it.

Private stays at Hacienda Botanica are arranged exclusively through Smiling Albino, with a minimum five-night buyout for up to 12 guests.

Source: CNA/bt