Mai Vejjajiva spends a lot of time travelling. As international marketing manager of Jim Thompson’s Thai Silk Company, Vejjajiva is often on the road, developing the company’s furniture and fabric collections and working with internationally acclaimed architects and designers such as Ed Tuttle, Christian Liaigre and Ou Baholyodhin. The long-haul flights may be tiring, but there are advantages, and when Vejjajiva came to doing up her new home in the Sukhumvit district of Bangkok, she not only had access to some of the best design advice available, but also had an enviable array of fabrics and furniture from which to choose.

Although she is in the interiors and textiles business, Vejjajiva admitted that she needed help in designing her new home, and while she had some idea of what she wanted, she wasn’t sure how it could be achieved. “I bought the apartment off plan early in 2006, which enabled me to reconfigure the interior space before it was built,” she says. “And Ou Baholyodhin, who is an old friend, drew up a plan that opened it up yet created nominal barriers, so that the main living space has defined kitchen, dining, living and study areas without losing the feeling of space and light.”

Baholyodhin also advised on the colour schemes. “I chose one based on grey and green: the green is fresh and lively but the grey is calm and serene.” The wooden floors were given a wash of light grey stain which softens the tone while allowing the grain to show through. The main walls are a soft bamboo green, while the panel on which the plasma TV and music system are placed is covered with golden, textured silk wallpaper.

The desk of the linear study faces a wall of bare, narrow bricks. “I particularly wanted this earthy element in the flat, to give it a grounding, rather than being totally soft and fabric-orientated,” explains Vejjajiva. Meanwhile, the built-in desk and panel-fronted bookcases allow her to work from home when dealing with clients across the United States and Europe.

One of the things that Vejjajiva stipulated in her brief was a red kitchen. “It’s just something that I have always wanted,” she says, “but I don’t do much Thai cooking – my parents live close by and the cooking at home is wonderful.” Having been educated in England and lived with her diplomat father in Canada, Belgium, France, England and America, her own culinary range is diverse.

The high-gloss façades of the kitchen unit doors are reflected in a mirrored panel on the facing wall, and the matt white, curving synthetic resin worktop adds a soft touch to the scheme. The worktop continues around the kitchen pillar into the living area; one side is used as a breakfast bar, the other as a mantel-like shelf.

The dining space is dominated by a restored, oval Sixties dining table and eight chairs found at a local shop which specialises in props hired by the film industry. “It’s a jumbled warehouse filled with furniture and artefacts and you really have to spend time there delving into dark corners and unearthing hidden treasures, but when I came across these I knew they were just what I needed.”

Once repaired and renovated with a fresh coat of white paint, the chairs were upholstered with a grey silk fabric from a recently launched collection by the new Jim Thompson brand, No.9 Thompson. The L-shaped sofa in the adjacent sitting area is covered in another silvery grey fabric from the same collection. The sofa itself, which helps to separate the dining and sitting areas, was designed by Baholyodhin for Jim Thompson in France.

The furniture in the sitting area is arranged around a finely tufted rug in shades of grey and ochre. The low coffee table has a neat return on the inside of the leg which doubles as a magazine and book holder. The sofa provides an ideal spot from which to look out over this part of the city’s leafy gardens and terraces, and through the columns of glass-walled office blocks that are so much a part of modern-day Bangkok.

The main bedroom has much the same cityscape outlook, but floor-length curtains in painterly vertical stripes of dusky blue, oatmeal and brown, by UK-based designer Richard Smith, can be pulled to conceal the view or to dampen the intense light that pierces the room during the day.

The wall behind the bed is covered in a silver version of the textured silk wallpaper found in the sitting room, and the adjacent wall is panelled with horizontal bands of wood which incorporate two bookshelves. Two wardrobes on either side of a corridor form a dressing room between the entrance to the bedroom and the sliding opaque glass door of the bathroom.

The glass shower enclosure intersects the corner of the bedroom, allowing natural light from the bathroom window to penetrate the centre of the room. Beyond the shower is the deep angular bath, which looks out on to the balcony and its pots of thriving bamboo.

The guest bedroom also has an en suite bathroom, with a glass surround to the basin and deep, mirrored cupboards above. The windows in this bedroom are dressed with floor-length linen curtains in a design, also by Richard Smith, called Jim’s Garden – inspired by the exotic gardening that was Jim Thompson’s passion.

For all her calming, muted colour schemes, Vejjajiva could not resist a “bit of bling”: three Verner Panton silver lights and lamps. The cascading shade above the dining table is composed of linear twists which quiver in the gentle breeze of the air conditioning. The lamp on the resin shelf at the end of the breakfast bar has a more metallic tinkle as its discs collide, and the floor lamp in Vejjajiva’s bedroom creates disco-like glitterball patterns at night.

But in spite of its overall global-modern style, in the entrance hall there is something which marks this out as a Thai home. Beside the panel of teak wood louvres, which adjust to conceal or reveal the view through to the dining area, there is a discreet cupboard.

“I had this built to hold visitors’ shoes,” says Vejjajiva. “Thai people always take their shoes off when entering a home, and I didn’t want stacks of trainers and discarded high heels cluttering up the hall.”

www.jimthompson.com

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