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Architects: Space Popular
- Area: 500 m²
- Year: 2020
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Photographs:Wison Tungthunya
Text description provided by the architects. Infinity Wellbeing is a new day spa in Bangkok's Sukhumvit area designed by Space Popular. The spa also launches Space Popular’s latest furniture collection - The Second Collection. Infinity Wellbeing is the second day spa designed by Space Popular in Bangkok for Infinity.
Surrounded by skyscrapers, bustling traffic, and street food vendors Infinity Wellbeing designed by Space Popular is an island within the city. Located just off Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok's modern commercial center, space is accessed directly from a busy street through a generous tropical garden. It creates a porous green bond with the city, inviting both passersby and local street cats to rest under an umbrella surrounded by dragon trees and lipstick palms.
Bangkok is organically structured on the linear footprint of rice fields and their canal systems, which once dominated the metropolis. A “Thanon” (major road) like Sukhumvit -which runs nearly 500 kilometers from the capital all the way to the Cambodian coast has hundreds of “Sois” (side streets) just like the one Infinity Wellbeing is on. The linearity of the Soi and the fact that Bangkok is the fourth warmest capital in the world has created a unique relationship between streets and buildings, an abrupt portal-like transition between the street and most interiors.
Through the leaves of the garden, the spa is in strong contrast to the street with its often chaotic collage of sounds and sights. Inside, materials are smooth, joints are precise, and space is deep. The arrival space which overlooks the garden introduces a calming palette dominated by white and pale green with elements of copper.
The furniture in the lobby is all part of Space Popular's latest collection, which features a lounge chair, a bar stool, a reclining chair with built in legrest, a side table, and a coffee table. All the pieces in the series are structured by mint green thick metal tubes combined with light petroleum blue upholstery. Together they construct an identity for space while providing comfort in different forms.
Throughout all spaces tailor-made materials and objects are combined in delicate ways with affordable, off-the-shelf materials such as packaging foam, a contrast often seen throughout Bangkok, which despite its abundance of luxury and shine manages to maintain its agility and inventiveness through its market and street food culture.
The arrival space with its central reception space and five distinct seating areas connects to three different types of the treatment room. The suites. facing the garden, are double rooms structured into different areas through contrasting material: the wet area with steam shower and toilet is treated with pale pink terrazzo and textured plaster surfaces, while the massage and lounge areas are dark blue with acoustic panelling on the walls and a grid of packaging foam on the ceiling. . The one suite that does not face the garden is its own separate world. With a textured plaster ziggurat ceiling and a sand tone palette, this room creates a sense of the outdoors even if it is buried under the hundreds of floors of the tower above. The single rooms are the brightest and in them, the use of backlit curtains and foam compensate for their smaller size. The corridors are clad in wooden finns painted in two different colours, exposing a different tone on arrival and departure.
All elements of the interior: finishes, furniture, objects, plants; both serve and structure the sequence and pace of the treatment, creating an all-encompassing experience from start to finish. Infinity Wellbeing by Space Popular opened in January 2020 and, after closure for several months following Bangkok’s Covid response regulations, it recently reopened.
