Villa Sala

Shades (Thailand) Co., Ltd.

The project was commissioned by the owner of a private villa at one of Phuket’s most exclusive residential-resort developments.

Our brief from the client was to design, fabricate and install a structure to provide shade for an outdoor dining area at his high-end villa located on a large seafront site on Phuket’s west coast. The outdoor dining area is located in a central and visually prominent position on the property and can be viewed from almost all areas of the property, including through the large double entrance doors, when open. The multi-building villa complex follows the traditional Thai architectural style with exaggerated high curved roof-lines, terracotta roofing tiles, sandstone paving and teak balustrading. Our brief was to come up with a design which not only achieved the practical objective of shading the dining area but one which also which blended absolutely with the architectural scheme of the property both in design shape and construction materials.

To achieve the design objective we chose a low-apex conical fabric structure with a top cone exaggerated in height to match the roof apex structures of the villa buildings (see accompanying photographs). For frame materials we selected milled round-section teak columns (114 millimeters outside diameter) and rafters (89 millimeters outside diameter). These are connected to the base and to each other with polished 316-grade stainless steel fittings, flush-fitted into deeper milled sections on the timber - footplates for the column feet and top caps, collars and lugs for the column-rafter joins. Lugs are joined with two bolt sets each to add rigidity to the structure. The rafters meet and slide into individual collars at a central stainless steel join fitting, which also incorporates the short flying mast and top ring. Catenary cables and corner plates are also polished 316-grade stainless steel.

The owner approved the design and was extremely happy with the result, expressing the opinion that the sala was “the highlight of his villa.” The dining area, which was previously seldom used because of exposure to sun, is now used regularly, to the extent that the owner has recently asked us to design and build a new larger sala to replace the existing version on the same location, which will be expanded to create a larger dining setting.

Project details

Location: Phuket, Thailand
Size: 12 sq.m
Fabrics: Duraskin 4017 by Verseidag-Indutex GmbH from HGV Thailand