Mon Kluen

By the beach amidst coconut trees, a house is a framing device that shelters.

Pioneering a broad stretch of the pristine Thapsakae Beach in Prachuap Khiri Khan, a Southern province of Thailand, the sheltering ensemble includes a stone shophouse adjacent to a small brick utility barn on a stone plinth within an open pavilion underneath an overarching roof.

While conceptualizing the vacation home on a spacious beachfront property nestled among coconut trees, we were intrigued by the owner’s reference to shophouses. The urban architectural type’s inherent efficiency and practicality greatly appeal to them. Although the generous property allows splaying the programs freely across the land, sprawling resort-style, the owner prefers the pragmatic elegance of vertical stacking, hence a compact double-decker of four bedrooms, stacked shophouse-style, on a site that invites boundless horizontality.

We took the prompt as a welcome challenge and an invitation to play, proposing to incorporate two additional types—a micro detached house and a traditional sala –mingling typologies across scales and cultures, elevating them on a shared stage of a stone plinth, anchoring them to the ground, and unifying the entire composition under one giant undulating roof form (which the owner found fittingly wave-like, echoing the sea). Sea breeze flows freely through its airy openness.

The outcome is an eccentric architectural hybrid that does not retreat into the landscape but aims to frame and celebrate it. Above all, it reflects the spirit of its inhabitants: bold, unapologetically practical, yet imaginative and open to contradiction.

Mon in Thai means spell or magic; Kluen means waves. Mon Kluen, as titled by its owner, translates to tidal spell.