It was more of a lark than a calculated business move: They wanted a scenic spot to drink beer, watch the sunset and escape their stressful jobs as medical experts in a country just beginning to recover from years of violent conflict. They didn’t plan on building the raised wood-pole house that now stands as a reflection of their friendship. At the time, there were no real estate agencies in Phnom Penh and the country’s land registry system was rudimentary. So the friends, Andrew Thomson and Ean Karona, walked the banks of the Mekong River, looking for a farmer who might sell them a plot. Dr. Thomson, a New Zealander working as a doctor for the United Nations, asked his Cambodian friend Mr. Ean, a physician’s assistant, how much the land might cost. “Not much” was the reply. Over the next few months, they purchased three plots totaling 4,290 square meters, or about one acre, of a riverside banana farm in this village that looks west across the Mekong, toward the Royal Palace. Dr. Thomson recalled that the price for the first two-thirds of the property — two lumps of gold worth about $2,500 each — was roughly equivalent to one month of his U.N. salary then. (It was common to buy land with gold at the time.) The view of the city from the property was stunning. But the village and its surroundings — which had been controlled by the Khmer Rouge about two decades earlier — were potentially dangerous at night. So the friends, who had met in 1987 at a tuberculosis hospital in a refugee camp on the Cambodia-Thailand border, limited their initial beer-drinking sessions to weekend afternoons. At the time, there was just a wooden hut and some banana and mango trees that had come with the land. In 1993, the United Nations posted Dr. Thomson to Haiti, and later to Rwanda, Bosnia and New York as the years passed. Dr. Thomson said that, in the course of his travels, he occasionally forgot that he and Mr. Ean owned the land. But in the late 1990s, Dr. Thomson and his wife, Suzanne Blanc-Thomson (they had met in Rwanda), decided to move to Cambodia from the United States. In 2000, when he met Mr. Ean at a Phnom Penh restaurant, they decided to build a one-level house, raised up on wooden poles, at their beer-drinking site. On a napkin, they sketched a rough design that a Cambodian contractor agreed to build for $5,000. (U.S. currency is widely used here.) Dr. Thomson mentioned the house in “Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures,” a 2004 memoir of U.N. peacekeeping work that he wrote with two colleagues. “At the end of the day, we’ll sit on the verandah in sarongs and sip our drinks and swat at mosquitos while the sun goes down orange over the river and the monks chant off in the distance,” he wrote in the final chapter. But when he took his wife for her first visit, the Mekong’s banks had just overflowed. Fish were swimming through the yard and when Ms. Blanc-Thomson leaned on a tree trunk she was attacked by a colony of red ants. “Darling, this is where we’re going to build our dream house,” Dr. Thomson said. “You’re mad,” Ms. Blanc-Thomson said, according to her husband. Before construction began, Mr. Ean hired 60 villagers to raise the property’s level by one meter, by moving earth from nearby fields with 30 oxcarts for four months. Mr. Ean also purchased some native hardwood logs that would raise the roof to a height of 10 meters, or about 33 feet. When the 320-square-meter house with orange roof tiles eventually appeared above the tree line, dwarfing the rest of the village, a few neighbors asked if he was building a Buddhist temple. Dr. Thomson and Ms. Blanc-Thomson arrived in 2005 with their 6-month-old daughter, Clara, and began settling into the house’s two bedrooms, modest kitchen and spacious living room.
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