Near Phnom Penh’s Hubbub, a Home Provides Calm and Savings

Arantxa Cedillo for The New York Times
Rory and Melita Hunter near the pool at their rented home in Phnom Penh

The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com

By SIMON MARKS
Published: June 2, 2009

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - About a mile from the roar of motorcycles crowding Phnom Penh’s main boulevards, amid tranquil greenery, stands the house where Rory and Melita Hunter have lived for the last three years.

“We fell in love with the place because it was a wooden, traditional Khmer house,” said Mrs. Hunter as she gazed out at their lush garden dotted with frangipani trees, sandstone boulders and orchids. “It makes you feel like you are in a sanctuary.”

The Australian couple are founders of the Brocon Group, a Cambodian-based property development company. Mr. Hunter, 34, holds the title of chief executive, and Mrs. Hunter, 35, is the creative director. When they first came to Cambodia in 2005, they lived on the banks of the Mekong River in a small village outside the city. But the drastic increase in traffic in and around the capital in recent years finally pushed their commute to more than an hour, prompting them to seek a more central location.

Foreigners are prohibited from owning land in Cambodia, so the Hunters took a five-year lease on a 450-square-meter (4,844-square-foot) two-story house that stands on 650 square meters (almost 7,000 square feet). Their rent is the equivalent of $2,000 a month.

There are no official statistics on the average cost of rentals here and several local real estate agents said that estimates tend to be skewed by high rents for top-end properties. But they agree that the market has slowed sharply in the global economic downturn. “There seems to be a marked decrease in international funds arriving and enquiring” about leaseholds, said Matthew Rendall, a partner with Sciaroni Associates, a law firm based in Phnom Penh.

Even though the Hunters are renting, they have done a lot of work on the house, which is built from native koki wood. “It provided us with the opportunity to live in a home we could never have dreamed of living in back home,” Mrs. Hunter said. “It’s also really open, which you can only really find in the tropics.”

Indeed, the renovations made by the couple include new ceilings and walls in the living room and kitchen — both rooms are completely open to the garden and rain comes in during the wet season. They also added new kitchen appliances and bathroom fittings, as well as a large L-shaped sofa with a brick base in the living room.

Mrs. Hunter said the airiness provided by the open spaces is much appreciated, particularly in the summer, when the city’s average daytime temperatures exceed 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), with high humidity. Many of the house’s interior doors have louvers and there are slatted shutters on most of the windows — all to help with the air flow.

Despite the improvements, the house retains much of its original personality: terra-cotta tiles in the living room and terrazzo flooring in the ground-floor bathroom have not been touched since the house was built in the 1950s. (Things have certainly changed since the house was first built, when grazing livestock inhabited the space that is now the living room.)

Two exterior staircases lead to the upper floor, which has an 18-square-meter (194-square-foot) balcony overlooking the garden. There are four bedrooms, including a nursery for their 8-month-old son, Naryth, and a master suite. All the rooms are painted white and furnished simply, giving the interiors a rustic feel.

Outdoors, there is a rectangular swimming pool, a patio outfitted with sofas that the couple uses for lounging and a small building that houses the laundry room and a storage area.

Mrs. Hunter says the house has improved greatly from the “converted garage feeling” it had when they moved in, and they now are thinking about extending the lease to continue working on it.

In the future, she said, she hopes to remove the external stairs and install a spiral staircase in the living room. “We have done a lot to the house already and I think it still managed to retain its original beauty,” she said. “But it’s work in progress.”