Relaxation options in Chiang Mai, Thailand, include the spa at the luxurious Four Seasons Resort.

Relaxation options in Chiang Mai, Thailand, include the spa at the luxurious Four Seasons Resort.

CHIANG MAI, Thailand — About 30 years ago, the gods of style looked down from design heaven on a town in central New Mexico. It was dusty and small, but they thought it had potential, so they nodded and turned it into Santa Fe.

They worked the same magic in Florida's South Beach, Morocco's Marrakech and California's Palm Springs, transforming unlikely places into global centers for cool contemporary architecture and design.

They're at it again in Chiang Mai, the old northern capital of Thailand. More than 700 years after the city was founded, a construction boom has given Chiang Mai some of the most stylish hotels and restaurants in Southeast Asia. Galleries and design stores have opened, showcasing textiles, ceramics, furniture, antiques and architectural salvage.

A decade ago, there was nothing cutting-edge about Chiang Mai, 400 miles north of Bangkok. The backpacker crowd chilled out in budget digs and trekked to ethnic tribal villages in the countryside. But then Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister of Thailand, started to spend lavish funds on the city of his birth, giving it new superhighways, an airport expansion and growth incentives.

Almost overnight, locals say, things went from quite dull to dynamic.

Luxurious design

To find the city's best contemporary design, I relied on the lushly illustrated "Chiang Mai Style" and "Lanna Renaissance" by Joe Cummings, a longtime Chiang Mai resident and author of Southeast Asia travel guidebooks. His architectural books ultimately led me to the Four Seasons Resort Chiang Mai and the new Mandarin Oriental Dhara Dhevi. Both are the stuff of luxury-hotel fantasies, and they have rates to match.

I settled instead into a $50 double at the amiable River View Lodge, which has a small swimming pool, waterfront garden and idiosyncratic collection of Thai tchotchkes, and took the shuttle to the village of Mae Rim, about 20 miles north of town.

It let me out at the Four Seasons entrance, so low-key that it belies the wonders inside. It's set in a veritable botanic park, where a small lake is surrounded by rice paddies, streams, waterfalls and flowering plants.

Designer Ajarn Chulathat Kitibutr evoked a traditional hill-country village by incorporating the style known as Lanna, and its signatures are everywhere: wood-plank walkways and bridges with slated railings, buildings raised on stilts, L-shaped verandas shaded by deep eaves, high-pitched roofs and ornamented gables.

The guest rooms are in pavilions on stilts scattered over the 20-acre grounds. The beds are canopied in gauzy white cotton, and the rooms have teak chests. The result is dreamy but understated, in harmony with the Lanna style, born when Chiang Mai was the capital of the La Na Thai, the land of a million rice fields, almost 700 years ago.
The craft of luxury

The Mandarin Oriental Dhara Dhevi, which opened in 2004, is in a walled compound on the east side of the city, near the umbrella-making village of Bo Sang and the weaving workshops of San Kamphaeng. The resort was the brainchild of Suchet Suwanmongkol, a Thai car dealer.
The resort was designed and decorated by a thousand of the region's most accomplished craftspeople. It reflects styles from all the regions that influenced the great Lanna kingdom, including Laos, China and Burma.

The 60-acre compound, with its own spire-studded skyline, is meant to resemble a Lanna city. From the front gate, a golf cart, pedicab or horse-drawn carriage takes guests to the open-air lobby. Wooden planks rumble under the wheels of the vehicle; they were built to rattle, evoking old Chiang Mai.

The lobby, under crenellated pagodas, is reached by a magisterial staircase. At the top is a long, burnished check-in desk, surrounded by decorated alcoves where it's easy to imagine W. Somerset Maugham or Joseph Conrad nursing a cocktail.

More traditional Lanna design inspired the guest villas, surrounding the resort's rice paddies, where you might see a farmer using a water buffalo. There is nothing rustic about the interiors, though, with their opulent blend of Thai silks, hill- tribe textiles and custom-designed teak furniture.

City sights

Back in Chiang Mai, the city now sprawls well beyond its medieval moat. Sidewalks are narrow and cracked. You need courage to cross a busy street. In the inevitable heat, sightseeing tends to be fatiguing but rarely fails to fascinate.

I temple-hopped and toured the Chiang Mai City Arts and Culture Center in a landmark colonial-era building on the north side of the old town. Another day, I hired a car and driver to take me up the mountain to Doi Suthep. There, a 300-step staircase leads to a gilded pagoda/temple.

The culinary landscape of Chiang Mai was as enticing as the visual one. At every turn, makeshift stalls with hot plates offered an enticing array of Thai street food: skewers of barbecued chicken coated in peanut sauce, steaming bowls of spicy noodle soup, ice cream for 10 cents a scoop.
The food and atmosphere were different but equally enchanting at the restaurant in the Chedi Hotel, which is so close to the city's Ping River that floods delayed its opening in 2005. At the heart of the hotel is the restored old British Consulate building as its center. This teak Thai-Victorian blend, built in 1913, now houses the restaurant, which spills onto a candlelit terrace.
The menu features international, Thai and Indian cuisine. Mine was a $50 meal, but prices in Chiang Mai are widely divergent. At most stylish shops, hotels and restaurants, you pay premium prices; everywhere else, it's inexpensive by U.S. standards. And shoppers can find cheap treasures at the Night Market and other street markets.

Upscale shopping

Chiang Mai's upscale design shops are clustered on Nimmanhaemin Road, Tha Phae Road and along Charoenrat Road in the Wat Ket district, on the east side of the Ping River.
With its mud-brown color and trash-lined banks, the river is no garden spot. But it is fun to cross on the footbridge with saffron-robed monks going to and from the 15th-century Ketkaram Temple. Many of Wat Ket's Chinese shop houses and teak wallah mansions have been restored and showcase goods made in traditional ways but updated by contemporary designers. At Sop Moei Arts and Vila Cini, I found Thai silk table runners, fabric and bamboo wall hangings, and beautifully woven chairs.

On the way back to central Chiang Mai, I wandered into Ketkaram Temple, a classic Thai Buddhist compound. A dozen uniformed schoolboys assembled around a huge bronze gong. When a teacher appeared, they performed a series of prostrations and began banging on the gong.

I took that moment home with me, along with a suitcase full of shopping treasures.