Escape to Cartagena, chill out in Chiang Mai, and discover elephant-inspired architecture

Sitting among tangles of oak and Monterey pine, on the lip of a canyon in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Owl House is part art, part architecture, its rich contradictions impossible to grasp at a glance. The redwood structure looks different from every angle – from the street, like a fox’s den hollowed out of the brush; from the canyon behind, like a massive, perched nest. Where it looms largest, however, it is also generously glazed, giving it the all-seeing gaze of its namesake. Inside, it feels exposed, enclosed and, in some places, both. Sculptural, layered and textural, it offers a series of inhabitable collages that are rigorous in their geometry, reverent toward nature, but playful nonetheless.

Designed in the early 1970s by architect Mickey Muennig – aka ‘the man who built the Big Sur’ – the house was restored in 2024 by landscape architect Bernard Trainor of Ground Studio. Then last year, its interiors were renovated by Wallpaper* US400 honoree Nicole Hollis’ San Francisco design studio for a pair of empty nesters, who use it as a weekend retreat. Shonquis Moreno wings her way over for an Owl House tour.

Olalekan Jeyifous is a builder of provocative futures. For ‘Hydricosmic Litanies’, a new solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center (opening 6 August), the Brooklyn-based artist, a trained architect and a Wallpaper* US400 honoree, imagined a society in Minneapolis that evolved around the ecology of the Mississippi River, which flows through the heart of the city. Working like an archaeologist discovering and documenting this culture, Jeyifous created digital collages of the cityscape, with highways that once displaced Black neighbourhoods transforming into waterways that sustain aquaculture, travel and housing. A series of 3D-printed sculptures depict the industrial, technical and cultural artefacts that this society produced and deities that protect them. ‘I’m always dusting off the fragments and figuring out who lived there, what they looked like, and what was important to them,’ he says.

Jeyifous’ worlds emerge from different parameters and narratives, but they share throughlines: communal societies, close relationships between people and natural ecosystems, and joyful Black life. Diana Budds met him to find out more.

The Bangkok-based American architect and designer Bill Bensley and his husband, horticulturalist and landscaper Jirachai Rengthong, have been building their private weekend retreat in the Mae Rim valley north of Chiang Mai for the better part of two decades – layering rooms, gardens, art collections and a suspension bridge over a river into something that defies straightforward description.

Hacienda Botanica is 16 hectares of Northern Thailand wrapped in a Mexican aesthetic: thick terracotta walls, shaded courtyards, casitas scattered across grounds of remarkable botanical richness. It has never been available to anyone except its owners and their guests – till now. Luxury travel company Smiling Albino has begun to offer the estate as an exclusive buyout. Eleven bedrooms, one valley, no other guests. Daven Wu checks in.

Architect and artist Boonserm Premthada has transformed elephant dung into an unlikely building material to create this striking series of sunset-coloured towers in Phang Nga, Thailand. Part of the Matalay project – a master-planned coastal community – the landmark is named after a local female elephant, Goya.