Botanica Khao Yai

Botanica Khao Yai is a landscape project by TROP terrains + open space, led by Pok Kobkongsanti with Peerasit Sangwanloy and Chanchai Wimonsirichotikun on the team, working with Vin Varavarn as architect. Located in the Khao Yai national park area, the project is a resort and residential development that draws its name from the botanical richness of the surrounding forest. The landscape design treats the existing sloping terrain as the primary material, retaining the natural undulation and inserting walkways, decks and planted mounds that follow the contour lines rather than cutting into the hill. A series of outdoor rooms, a swimming pool, a children's play area and an open-air dining terrace are arranged along the slope, each framed by mature trees and new tropical planting. The planting palette is drawn from the local flora, with large canopy trees, ferns and flowering understorey species that give the resort the feeling of a botanical garden. The project is a demonstration of how a resort can be embedded in a sensitive natural landscape without flattening it, using contour-following terraces and native planting to produce a layered, immersive experience. It is part of TROP's body of work that treats tropical landscape as a designed ecosystem rather than a decorative setting. The result is a resort that grows out of the Khao Yai hills, where guests can walk from their villas through planted slopes to the pool and restaurant, surrounded by the same vegetation that characterises the national park nearby.