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Phuket Thavorn Museum – Phuket’s Quirkiest Museum

Thavorn Private Collection

The Thavorn Museum is so bizarre we had to write about it, this is without a doubt the quirkiest museum in Phuket and beyond! I’m not even a fan of what we could call ‘local life displays’ museums, (but I do love Art museums). I went there maybe twice in the past and it was already odd at the time, but this blog is taking me back to every place I thought I knew.

In the very centre of Phuket Town is the Thavorn Hotel, don’t worry if you missed it, everyone does. I’m not talking about the Thavorn hotel near Kamala, but the original Thavorn Hotel. Many residents actually know about it, they might even have visited this so-called ‘museum’.

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Here I was, entering this very old anonymous-looking hotel and ready to pay my little fee… but the museum was closed. I had to wake up the old lady sleepy (literally, see the photo, I hope she won’t get in trouble) at the reception to know that it was in fact still open, but they had to unlock the doors and switch on the lights for me. Not a good sign of popularity. So I paid 30 baht and walked in, and it was all here… exactly as I remembered it! Maybe dirtier and dustier, display windows a bit less transparent than a few years ago, more rust on the toys, more termites damage to the furniture. Halfway between jaw-dropping and funny. Let me summarize it for you: for 30 baht, you get a glimpse of all the junk discarded by the hotel since the day it was open. The old calculators, typewriters, telephone dispatches, fridges and decorations abandoned randomly around a large room still with the original dust and dirt on it! Then you have the tin toys… that were actually my favourite items, but in such abandoned condition it is kind of sad… there use to be some light on these shelves, but now it’s just rust and dust, hard to see through the filthy windows. Toy Story would not like it.

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The museum might look ok on my photos with all these frames hanging everywhere, but looking closely, you’ll notice that most of the photos in these frames are so faded you can hardly read them… (Anyway, never trust a photographer! They can’t resist making everything look better than real!) After a while, I left the main room wondering what did I really see in there? Well, not much!

I moved to another room also displaying old unused items from the hotel, an ironing station and the skeleton of a Honda Dream. I was puzzled by shelves covered with buttons and zippers… where did they come from? all the buttons lost by the hotel customers in the past hundred years? So how did the zippers end up here? I left the ‘museum’ with a smile on my face, quirky but surprising in a way.

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Thavorn Museum Info

Location: Phuket Town
Address: 74 Rassada Rd, Tambon Talat Yai, Mueang Phuket District, Phuket 83000
Tel: 023 056859
Price: 30 Baht


Thavorn Museum Map

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