The story
A flood-prone Bangkok house becomes a living experiment.
Baan Tam-na begins with an ordinary and difficult urban condition: a 50-year-old Bangkok house sitting below the road and repeatedly exposed to flooding. Its owners imagined the renovation as both a workplace for environmental practitioners and a public case study in lower-waste city living. Existing materials were sorted for reuse, resale, or recycling, while proposed systems included flood management, water storage and natural treatment, composting, a biogas toilet, clay-based cooling, greywater reed beds, vertical growing, and solar power. The goal was not a polished eco-showroom, but a place where people could work, stay, exchange separated waste, and see circular systems operating at household scale.
The archive also records the project’s real challenges: conventional contractors struggled with the experimental brief, and portions of the work were paused. Journeyman International’s involvement supported a design process willing to learn from those constraints. Baan Tam-na is therefore best told as an ongoing renovation and demonstration project—ambitious, imperfect, and valuable because it makes urban sustainability tangible.
