Chim Chim is a Bold New Bangkok Spot

In a dining landscape where muted hues and soft pastels have seemingly become the norm, Bangkok’s Chim Chim restaurant, with its industrial touches, poppy art, upcycled and mid-century furniture and terrazzo floors, takes a boldly different approach

What do Arne Jacobsen’s Swan chairs, bold African wax prints and Thai paper kites have in common? Very little. Yet they find a surprisingly harmonious home at Chim Chim, a polychromatic new restaurant on the ground floor of Bangkok’s Siam@Siam Design Hotel. 

‘We like visual accidents,’ says Simon Pillard, one half of the Bangkok-based multidisciplinary design duo Munchausen, which spearheaded the restaurant’s design. ‘Studying art in France, we realised that there are no boundaries between good taste and bad taste — so we just mixed different elements together to see if they provided an emotion, a sense of visual excitement.’

With the hotel’s former buffet restaurant as their canvas, the duo — Pillard and fellow Parisian designer Philippe Rossetti — had ample room for experimentation. They stripped the architectural structure of its frills, leaving a lofty white space with exposed ceilings, a steel mezzanine and floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides. The original hardware, such as the open kitchen, bar and buffet island were clad in black-and-white terrazzo and slatted wood panelling, which alongside wall dividers made from square breeze blocks adds a hint of mid-century Palm Springs.

The interior blends Bauhaus touches with tribal patterns and pop art on the walls. Seating arrangements span Saarinen Tulip tables to low-slung ottomans upholstered in African wax prints. Eames plywood chairs stand next to sofas covered in Jim Thompson silks. Giant rattan pendant lights hang overhead, and a custom-made rug in eye-popping cobalt blue covers part of the terrazzo floor. In line with the hotel’s sustainability ethos, many of the original furnishings were upcycled, some with a poppy paint job, others with new upholstery in patterned fabric or blue tarpaulin.

It’s a daring mix of shapes, textures, patterns and colours, but it doesn’t feel incohesive. ‘We love to collect objects and pieces of furniture, and to create a language between them,’ Pillard says. ‘The colours appeared naturally through the patterns and fabrics, like a collection of paintings on the wall.’

As smart boutique accommodations have popped up all over Bangkok in the past few years, this once trailblazing design hotel had slowly begun to lose its lustre. But with a new generation at the helm of the family business, that’s set to change. Chim Chim follows the opening of Paradise Lost, the hotel's ‘neo-tropical’ rooftop bar designed by Australian studio Mash (also behind Bali’s Motel Mexicola) and TAAN, a sleek, locally focused Thai restaurant. With Chim Chim as a crowd-pleasing new addition, Siam@Siam has become Bangkok's unexpected comeback kid.

Text / Chris Schalkx
Images / Yathip Nuangnitnaraporn