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Published on February 18, 2008

There's nothing special about this house," says owner Waraporn Suravadi of the 70-year-old, all-wood residence that's now the Bangkokian Museum.

Her plain-spoken announcement strikes her visitors from the Quiet Bangkok Club as a little odd: The building has nothing in common with the average person's house.

Waraporn's home, occupying 2,000 square metres on Charoenkrung 43 Road, is particularly special because she's opened it to the public. The Bangkokian Museum reflects the everyday history of ordinary people in a bygone day.

If you want to see an old Bangkok home that's now filled with a wondrous display of riches, go to the Jim Thompson House. "What's special here," says Waraporn, "are the things that were used in real life, still kept in their places, just as they used to be."

Waraporn, 72, runs Kasem Bundit University's registration and evaluation office. It would have been easy for her to sell her inherited property, with its prime location, for a few hundred million and go buy herself some luxury.

But in 1992, two years after her mother died, she turned it into a museum. She sold some family property in Thungmahamek and in 1999 transported the wooden house that was there to Charoenkrung Road. The visitors she's had over the past 15 years have been a constant source of pleasure for her.

For a while Waraporn considered turning her home into a shelter for people in need - elderly or children or ailing. But its store of well-preserved items from long ago convinced her to establish a museum instead.

Initially she offered the premises to the Fine Arts Department, but the government agency wanted her to move out - and then stay out of the way. As a result she gave parts of the property to the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration in 2003, to become one of four pilot folk-museum projects.

"I wanted to make sure the property would be open to the public so they could learn about our past," says Waraporn, who lives on the upper floor of one of the four buildings on the site.

And so she did, getting involved with everything from renovation to exhibition displays. She consulted museum experts about the right way to restore the old houses and studied different ways of putting items on show.

Establishing the museum was difficult, but Waraporn discovered that maintaining it is even harder. She occasionally has run-ins with bureaucrats over budget delays - when termites descended on the main building two years ago it took an age for funding to be approved to tackle the problem.

The termites were unwilling to wait, so she paid for the necessary work.

The museum comprises three buildings in a lovely green setting. In the main house are the day-to-day wares of yesteryear, on display in the ground-floor living and dining rooms and the bedroom upstairs, which is preserved as if it still belonged to Waraporn's mother.

Wood was considered an unusual building material when the house was constructed in 1937; cement was expensive but had overtaken teak to become the latest trend. The white walls you see today are a legacy of the paint job meant to disguise the wood as cement.

Decades later, of course, it is cement that's cheap and teak homes that are priceless.

"Lots of cement buildings have deteriorated and are hard to fix, but the teakwood is still there," says Waraporn.

The second building at the museum is a converted row of six shophouses. Various home implements are on view on the lower floor, while upstairs there's an exhibition on the history of Bangrak district.

Waraporn maintains a third building as her private residence.

The fourth structure, also given to the BMA, is the house that was relocated here, which had served as the medical clinic of Waraporn's stepfather, Francis Christian.

It's easy to tell which of the displays were mounted by Waraporn. Though far plainer than those prepared by city officials, they convey in their sentiment a genuine sense of belonging.

Waraporn enjoys managing the museum. She arranges activities, such as performances of likay, the musical folk drama, and is planning a presentation of music from the 1960s.

Thursdays and Sundays, when she's not at the university, are spent here conducting group tours. The lifelong teacher has obviously learned a lot about history, and she shares her anecdotes with ease, such as the story of the century-old clay jar used to store thousand-year-old eggs.

Apart from a few items that belonged to her best friend, now deceased, every item on view is a Suravadi family original.

With one other exception.

"The piano is not the original from my mother's time," she says. The family piano was sold when they needed money in difficult times following World War II, so Waraporn bought another one based on her childhood recollection.

The mementoes and the memories convince her that she made the right decision in opening the museum, but also that she can never abandon it.

"What's the point in having a big house and living here alone?" Waraporn says, vowing that she'll never close the museum, even if bureaucracy becomes a bully.

"How could you shut the door with the excuse that you're running out of money from the government?"

The Bangkokian Museum on Soi Charoenkrung 43 is opens daily from 10 to 5. There is no admission charge.

Sirinya Wattanasukchai

The Nation