Many weekends we drive down from Chiang Mai. Road bike before sunrise, kite in the afternoon, dinner by the water. We've been doing it for years.

But we could never find the right place to stay — or own. Either too big, too corporate, too far from the water, or built for a version of Thailand that isn't the one we actually live in.

So we bought a big piece of land, paid it off, and sectioned it into four chanots. Year one we filled the whole plot up a meter. Now we're building.