PAPAYA — Four Floors of Antiques in the Heart of Bangkok

It started with a fourteen-year-old and his savings

Long before PAPAYA had a name, it had an obsession. Supoj Siripornlertkul — everyone calls him Mr. Tong — fell for antiques as a boy. At fourteen, he spent every last baht he'd saved on old, beautiful things. That was the beginning. He kept buying, trading and collecting, and by twenty-one, still a college student, he opened his first shop at Pom Mahakan.

He didn't just sell, either — he designed and built his own furniture and shipped it around the world. From Eastern European ceramics to a drawer of mismatched forks and spoons to oil paintings taller than you are, if you can picture it, PAPAYA has probably got it somewhere on the floor.

The collector who'd rather buy than sell

Here's the open secret about Mr. Tong: he loves buying far more than selling. He calls every piece a teacher. Each one, he says, is charming in its own way — and like wine, antiques only grow rarer and more valuable with time.

Every three months he and the PAPAYA team fly to Europe to hunt and hand-pick the next arrivals, whether or not they'll ever be sold. Mostly he buys them because he feels something standing in front of them — and because he wants to pass that feeling on to you.

A shop that behaves like a museum

PAPAYA isn't really a shop you visit once. Regulars swear they find something new every single time — a lamp, a chair, a strange and wonderful object that wasn't there last month. As one customer put it, PAPAYA is like an antique museum, except you can touch and feel everything. Bring time. You'll want it.

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