When asked to explain why his private estate in Chiang Mai looks nothing like Northern Thailand, Bill Bensley said, “Hacienda Botanica is our home, not a client brief and, therefore, it is allowed to be a little unreasonable. If private houses cannot misbehave, what hope is there for mankind?”The line is delivered with the breezy certainty of someone who has designed more than 200 hotels, resorts and private residences across 30 countries and thus earned the right to an opinion. But it also, rather precisely, explains Hacienda Botanica – 16 hectares of Mexican fever dream along the eastern banks of the Mae Rim River, less than an hour north of Chiang Mai and now, for the first time, available for private stays through luxury travel company Smiling Albino.The estate is the Bangkok-based American designer’s country manse to Baan Botanica, his storied Bangkok residence. Long before a single column was raised, Bensley and Jirachai Rengthong, a horticulturist and the botanical intelligence behind both properties, spent years acquiring antique materials across the region – columns, doors, windows, floors, ceilings and architectural fragments – in anticipation of a site they had not yet found.