Jim Thompson House is a somewhat Ideal Home in elegant Thai style, and a peaceful refuge from downtown chaos. The house was the residence of the legendary American adventurer, entrepreneur, art collector and all-round character whose mysterious disappearance in the jungles of Malaysia in 1967 has made him even more of a legend among Thailand's Foreigner Community. Apart from putting together this beautiful home, Thompson's most concrete contribution was to turn traditional silk weaving from a dying art into the highly successful international industry it is today. The grand, rambling house is in fact a combination of six teak houses, some from as far afield as Ayutthaya and most over 200 years old. Like all traditional houses, they were built in wall sections hung together without nails on a frame of wooden pillars, which made it easy to dismantle them, pile them onto a barge and float them to their new home. Although he had trained as an architect, Jim Thompson had more difficulty in putting them back together again; in the end, he had to go back to Ayutthaya to hunt down a group of carpenters who still practiced the old house-building methods. Jim Thompson added a few unconventional touches of his own, incorporating the elaborately carved front wall of a Chinese pawnshop between the drawing room and the bedroom, and reversing the other walls in the drawing room so that their carvings faced into the room. The impeccably tasteful interior has been left as it was during Jim Thompson's life, even down to the cutlery on the dining table. Complementing the fine artifacts from throughout Southeast Asia is a stunning array of Thai arts and crafts, including one best collection of traditional Thai paintings in the world. Thompson picked up plenty of bargains from the Thieves' Quarter (Nakhon Kasem) in Chinatown, before collecting Thai art became fashionable and expensive. Other pieces were liberated from decay and destruction in upcountry temples, while many of the Buddha images were turned over by ploughs, especially around Ayutthaya. Some of the exhibits are very rare, such as a seventeenth-century Ayutthayan teak Buddha, but Thompson also bought pieces of little value and fakes simply for their looks - a shopping strategy that is all the more sensible in the jungle of today's Thai antiques trade.
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