One of the better-located real-estate projects in the eastern suburbs is Blue Lagoon, by Number One Housing Development. Situated along the Outer Ring Road near the entrance of the Bang Na-Trat Highway at kilometre marker 8, rising just before you reach Golden Land's Grand Monaco Housing Estate, Blue Lagoon offers a 97-rai gated community flanking a lake that covers roughly 50 rai. Apart from the main grounds, the developer has set aside 10 rai for a small park filled with landscaped gardens.

First-time developer Number One Housing has planned a posh residential site with 268 luxury homes. These detached units are constructed on plots starting from 60 square wah. The smallest housing designs offer three and four bedrooms with 183 square metres of usable living space.

The homes start at Bt6 million, with the largest going for Bt20 million. Prices do not include air-conditioners or furniture.

There are a number of completed units currently available for viewing from 9am to 6pm daily.

With recent sharp increases in traffic snarls near the Bang Na-Sukhumvit and Bang Na-Srinakarin intersections, Blue Lagoon is a reasonable choice. Buyers will be able to use the Outer Ring Road and avoid these problem areas, which will become even more prone to traffic disaster once Suvarnabhumi Airport opens in a few months, ushering even more vehicles into an already-overcrowded zone.

The Outer Ring Road has proved useful in ferrying residents out of Bang Na for two years now, sparing them jams of an hour or more along Sukhumvit and Srinakarin roads.

With the explosion of new housing projects opening up next year, those sections of road will be bad for commuters and residents.

Blue Lagoon is among the more fortunate estates in that it will escape the chaos of a badly planned city whose runaway growth has engulfed the eastern suburbs in just a few short years.

Overbuilding has made life unbearable for residents in the affected areas. Heavy and overloaded industrial lorries are but one reason why so many accidents happen along those roads. Often, they spill their cargo onto the road, wreaking havoc and causing injuries and fatalities when cars travelling at high speeds slam into the debris, which happens fairly regularly.

This is one reason why housing developments have avoided the area for decades, until recently, when a shortage of cheap land forced them into this final frontier.

Itthi C Tan

The Nation