Suan Pakkad Palace

Suan Pakkad means cabbage patch, which is what the land was before Prince Chumbhot of Nagara Svarga and his wife Princess Chumbhot built here in the 1950s. What they made is a compound of eight traditional Thai teak houses, moved from family properties in Bangkok and Ayutthaya and reassembled around a garden with ponds - a domestic architecture museum by assembly rather than reconstruction. Inside are the prince's collections: Ban Chiang pottery from the north-eastern prehistoric culture, Khmer and Thai sculpture, shells, minerals and musical instruments. The set piece is the Lacquer Pavilion, a seventeenth-century Ayutthaya-period building the prince found in a monastery near Ayutthaya and had moved here, its interior walls covered in black-and-gold lacquer scenes of the Ramakien and the life of the Buddha, and it is among the finest surviving Ayutthaya lacquer work anywhere. It is quiet and takes two hours.

The main sights

• The Lacquer Pavilion - Ayutthaya-period black-and-gold lacquer interiors.
• The eight teak houses - moved and reassembled around a garden.
• The Ban Chiang pottery - prehistoric north-eastern ceramics in the collection.
• The garden - ponds and planting linking the houses.

When to go

November to February. Weekday mornings are quietest - it is never crowded. Two hours covers it. Closed on some public holidays.

Things to know

Ticketed, and more expensive than most Bangkok museums. Houses have steep traditional stairs and thresholds. Photography is restricted in the Lacquer Pavilion. Labelling is variable in English.

Nearby

Jim Thompson House is a short distance south; Phaya Thai BTS and the airport link are close.

Key facts