Learn to create Thai cuisine with organic ingredients from our Permaculture gardens. Learn to make soap, shampoo and other Home Care products.
Welcome to Earth Home (Maejo Baandin)
Earth Home is first and foremost a guesthouse designed with sustainability and environmental awareness at its heart. It is an educational learning center that offers workshops with a specific focus of working in harmony with nature and empowering people and communities. Earth Home has nine hand built Adobe brick houses for guests to stay in, a dormitory for budget travelers, a Cafe (with WiFi), restaurant and Permaculture gardens with food forest surrounding the center. All food is carefully grown, prepared and lovingly cooked by the Earth Home team for its guests.
Earth Homes mission is fourfold
* Promoting the construction of simple, effective and complete homes with natural building materials.
* Teaching the principles of healthy and sustainable living through Permaculture, organic farming and other workshops.
* Providing a homestay for guests to come experience and learn about sustainable living.
* Teaching children basic and important life skills by living with and taking care of nature (Earth Home School)
The inspiring story of Thongbai and Earth Home Thailand
” Teaching happiness through simplicity”
Thongbai Leknamnarong, owner and creator of Earth Home, was born in Maejo Village and at fifteen years of age, she left her village for the city life of Bangkok. After twenty fours years of living in Bangkok she realized that the happiness and freedom that she sought for in the city was not as she had imagined. She decided to return to her home village 15 years ago to bring up her children.
In 2003, Jon Jandai, a self-taught philosopher in sustainable living moved to Baan Maejo. Here, Jon started offering workshops in natural building and Permaculture, and since then people from around the world and Thailand got to know about this little village by the name of Pun Pun Thailand.
In 2004, Thongbai attended a natural building course at and was one of Jon’s first students from the area. Thongbai immediately understood the advantages of building with natural materials and set out to build her first natural building, all by herself! Since then, she’s built many structures naturally, including all the buildings that are offered for homestay at her home, a local village school, a building to house a hydroelectric generator in the village, a home for a monk, and a meditation center in Myanmar.
In 2007, Thongbai registered a little local business by the name of Homestay Maejo Baandin with several of her local friends with the intention to offer simple accommodation in natural buildings, and to promote a simple and organic lifestyle. That was the beginning of the Earth Home story and the beginning of the local villagers offering services that cater to the eco-tourism that sprouted in the area, sharing their skills and knowledge in organic farming and wood carving, and engaging in cultural exchange with the visitors.
The house that Thongbai built — all by herself!!
“Earth Home” in the Thai language is called Baandin (clay house), and since it is situated in Baan Maejo (Maejo Village), P’Thongbai named it Maejo Baandin. Baan Maejo is a small village of 110 houses with 400 people. Most of the villagers are farmers, growing rice and different kinds of seasonal vegetables and plants. Not many people knew about this village and there were no visitors as it is in the middle of nowhere, the end of a long road that leads into the mountains of Sri Lanna National Park.
Slowly, day by day, Baan Maejo has new visitors and has become one of the main learning centers in natural building and Permaculture in Thailand.
“ Where there is Earth, There is Home, Where there is Seed, There is Life ”
Homestay Maejo Baandin has become one of the learning centers for people all over Thailand and the world, sharing knowledge of how to live a simple, healthy life. We teach people how to build houses from adobe, we share knowledge on how to farm organically, and we arrange for cooking lessons for anyone who wants to learn to cook Thai food. We are proud to become a center for skill-sharing and cultural exchange, giving opportunities to locals and visitors from everywhere around the world to meet and learn from each other. We are happy that we can share our unique local lifestyle, and to help preserve local knowledge.