DARE – Design Arena + Research Wraps a 30-Year-Old Bangkok House in Curved Screens to Face a New Road

Most renovation stories begin with a tired building. Reborn House begins with a changed neighbourhood. The roughly 30-year-old house sits in a village on the suburban edge of Bangkok, and a new public road has cut that village in two. The road turned a quiet residential pocket into a busy district, and the house lost its privacy, its sense of security and much of its green space. DARE – Design Arena + Research, with lead architect Kunnapat Wongthavornman and designers Suchawadee Tansuwan and Natrada Chatritdhichaikul, took on a problem that was urban before it was architectural.

The original house followed Thailand's early modern residential style: compartmentalized rooms, complex hip roofs and plenty of wood. What interests us is how much of that inheritance the architects kept, and how much they quietly turned around. The hipped roof stays. The timber stays, in turned balusters and oak joinery. But the house now presents a soft, almost blank face to the road and opens itself inward, toward a garden, a pond and a double-height room. At 145 m², the house reads as a careful edit, and the restraint is the point.

A Soft Wall Against a Hard Road

The street facade is the clearest statement of intent. A curved grey panel wall wraps the ground floor, interrupted by a gate and a single tree planted at the centre. Above it, translucent balcony screens bend around the upper floor and glow at dusk. The composition feels defensive without being fortified. A newly busy road could easily have justified a solid wall and a steel gate; instead you get curves, a tree and light leaking through a membrane.

The tree matters more than it seems. It does the work a garden used to do for the whole village: it softens the boundary, filters the view and gives passersby something to look at other than the house itself. Placing it dead centre also makes it a kind of emblem, a statement that the green space the road took away is being returned, at least in part, on the owners' own plot.

Keeping the Roof, Changing the Skin

From above, the move is easy to read. The grey tiled hip roof of the original house remains, sitting among neighbours with green roofs, while the curved white balcony screens form a new layer below its eaves. The old silhouette is untouched; the change happens at the level of the walls, where privacy is actually won or lost.

In daylight, the front elevation shows fluted gate panels and a planted bed tucked beneath the curved balconies. Looking up, the screen edge reads as a fine white mesh against the sky. The credited manufacturers include Serge Ferrari, known for technical membranes, which points to how this skin was made, though we would not claim more than that. Either way, the screens filter rather than block, letting the upper rooms look out while the street sees only a pale, shifting surface.

A Ground Floor That Opens Inward

Behind the curved wall, the house relaxes. The living room opens through a floor-to-ceiling sliding glass wall onto a timber deck and a small pond, with climbing vines working their way up the boundary. This is where the defensive street face pays off: because the perimeter is handled, the interior can be glassy and open without feeling exposed.

The side entrance continues the mood at dusk, with lit stone steps, a black basin and hanging vines alongside the glazed living room. Arrival here feels like moving through a garden, not just a doorway. For a house that lost its green surroundings, rebuilding a landscape at this intimate scale is a sensible answer.

The Double-Height Dining Room as the New Centre

The early modern Thai house was a sequence of separate rooms. The renovation breaks that pattern at the dining area, which rises through two storeys under globe pendants. Sliding glass doors connect the room to the garden and vines, and a kitchen niche with a marble backsplash, a lit floating shelf and oak cabinetry sits just behind the glass dining table.

This volume does the social work the old compartments could not. It lets light fall deep into the plan, links both floors visually and gives the family a shared room that faces the garden instead of the road. The palette stays disciplined, mostly oak, white and marble, so the height itself becomes the main event.

The Stair Keeps the Old Vocabulary

The staircase is where the house's history is most visible. Dark turned-wood balusters and handrails, seen from above, spiral through white walls washed with daylight. They read as a direct nod to the wooden elements of the original house, whether salvaged or newly made in the same spirit. In the double-height room, the balustrade frames the view of someone working at a wooden table below.

Upstairs, the language becomes calmer: a curved white hallway wall, a concealed cove light and pale timber doors at the end of a herringbone floor. The curve inside echoes the curve outside, a small but deliberate consistency that ties the street screens to the private corridor.

Making Room for the Altar

A Thai home without a place for its Buddha images would feel incomplete, and the architects treated the altar as architecture rather than furniture. Tiered white marble shelves step up beside the stair landing, holding small Buddha figures and marigolds. In another view, marble altar steps carry bronze figures below a corner window looking out to the neighbouring rooftops.

Placing the altar at the landing gives it height and a daily presence, since everyone passes it on the way upstairs. The corner window keeps it connected to the wider village, a gentle reminder that the house still belongs to a community even as it guards itself from the road.

Upstairs Rooms Built Around Work and Light

The bedrooms carry built-in oak desks, some floating beneath interior windows, some running along an interior glass wall beside the bed and wardrobes. Sliding glass doors open onto balconies with trees and green fields beyond, the same view the curved screens soften from the street side.

Designing every bedroom with a proper desk is a practical response to how people actually live now, with work and study happening at home. The interior glazing borrows light and views across rooms, so even a compact second floor feels connected rather than boxed in.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan shows the problem plainly: a new road slicing through the village and a park, with agricultural plots around the edges. The ground floor plan, labelled first floor in Thai convention, gathers car park, terrace, pond, living, dining, kitchen and a bedroom around a garden, confirming the inward orientation. Upstairs, a corridor serves two bedrooms, a bathroom, a terrace and a planter alongside the stair void and the retained tiled roof.

The sections are the most revealing drawings. They show the pitched roof over a stacked arrangement of bedrooms above and living spaces below, a reading corner tucked into the ground floor, and terraces with trees at both ends. The trees bracket the house, giving each end a green buffer.

Why This Project Matters

Fast-growing cities rarely ask permission before they reshape a neighbourhood. Roads, rail lines and new districts arrive, and the houses that were there first absorb the consequences. Reborn House is a useful case of a family staying put and adapting, and of architects treating infrastructure as a design condition rather than a reason to demolish.

The lesson is in the balance. DARE – Design Arena + Research kept the hipped roof and the timber spirit of an early modern Thai house, then added a curved, filtering skin and an inward-facing core. The result protects without shutting down, and it shows that a 145 m² renovation can answer an urban problem with tact instead of walls.

Reborn House by DARE – Design Arena + Research (lead architect Kunnapat Wongthavornman; design team Suchawadee Tansuwan and Natrada Chatritdhichaikul), Bangkok, Thailand. 145 m², completed 2024. Photography by Rungkit Chareonwat.

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