In Cambodia, a Contemporary Home in a Pastoral Setting

Borath Ros and his French wife, Danièle, built a modern three-bedroom home in Siem Reap, Cambodia.(Justin Mott for The New York Times)

By NAOMI LINDT
August 31, 2011

SIEM REAP, Cambodia — As a young Cambodian architect in the 1960s, Borath Ros never imagined it would take nearly half a century before he would see his tropical dream house come to fruition. Nor could he have predicted that his son and daughter would help him design it.

Mr. Ros was a student during the height of the modernist, Le Corbusier-inspired, concrete-enamored movement known as New Khmer Architecture, which established Cambodia as a regional beacon of urban design in the decade after the country’s independence from France in 1953.

But in 1972, as the Khmer Rouge rose to power and intellectuals like Mr. Ros and his French wife, Danièle, became targets of the brutal regime, the couple fled Cambodia to build a life in Paris.

It would be 20 years before they would return, eventually taking up residence in 2001 in Siem Reap, the provincial town near the Angkor Wat temples, where Mr. Ros, 68, is a deputy director of the Apsara Authority, the government agency that protects the temples.

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