In 1998, right at the water’s edge of the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, I completed a space called INNERTIME. For a brief, breathless moment, it was in my view the most beautiful dance school on the planet.

To understand why it existed, you have to understand the convergence of my two worlds. I was a trained architect and an elite competitive Latin ballroom dancer. Dance for me was never a pastime. It was an exacting discipline rooted in world class pedigree. I had trained under Paul Green, who had recently retired as undefeated Australian Champion over many years, and both of us traced our lineage back to Helen and Robert Richey, the highest ranked Australian couple in ballroom history. By the late nineties, I was the reigning National Champion of Thailand and had won the 1997 South East Asian Championship. Demand for my coaching was relentless, so establishing my own academy was the natural evolution. Because I saw space through the disciplined eye of an architect, I refused to build just another dance studio.

By that stage, I had travelled the world. I had competed in the grandest international arenas and trained under the most revered coaches on earth, yet almost universally, the spaces we danced in were aesthetic disasters. They were cluttered, kitschy, and frankly cheesy. You would step into studios wrapped in garish pastel pink walls, humming fish tanks at reception, dusty floral pendant lights, and curling posters of Fred Astaire taped to the mirrors. There was always a grandmother in the corner hand stitching rhinestones onto a ballroom gown, or a cat casually strolling across the floor mid routine. These places felt like accidental social clubs, devoid of gravity or architectural intent. Where was the reverence? Where was the sacred theatre built purely for physical mastery?

Aside from my own home and my current office, INNERTIME was the very first architectural work where I was both the client and the architect. It was a rare, uncompromising canvas, a pure labour of love and passion where my architectural artistry and my dance artistry converged into a single vision.

I conceived it not as a commercial studio, but as an austere, minimalist art gallery. The guiding philosophy was absolute: the space had to be completely stripped of ornament and visual clutter so that the only piece of art in the room was the human body in motion.

Bringing that vision to life within a notoriously narrow building footprint demanded genuine spatial ingenuity, as well as a resourceful response to a tightly limited budget. To stretch our funds without compromising quality, I deliberately slowed the pace of construction, kept the team tiny, and worked on site myself as a physical labourer. Nothing was beneath me. Day after day, I was covered in dust, sanding timber, cutting trim, rolling paint, and learning every single trade from the ground up. I genuinely loved getting my hands dirty, and by the time the work was done, I did not just think like an architect; I understood the materials with the instincts of a seasoned tradesperson.

Every millimetre of that narrow footprint was carefully resolved. I positioned the dance floor between the widest structural spans to maintain maximum clearance for movement, then installed a continuous floor to ceiling mirror wall with virtually seamless joints. The glass dissolved the room boundary, instantly doubling the sense of space into an expansive plane. During the day, the studio was washed in an ethereal, shadowless glow from thoughtfully placed frosted windows and skylights set into the roof. Everything was custom made, from the flush door handles and low profile light fittings to the discreet speaker brackets engineered to float invisibly off the gallery walls.

Then came the floor. At the time, nearly every dance studio in Thailand relied on solid parquet glued directly to a concrete slab, a punishing surface that took a severe toll on a dancer’s joints and shins. I was determined to give my dancers the first properly sprung floor in the country. Building an elevated sprung timber floor at ground level right on the Chao Phraya, however, was an engineering nightmare. Bangkok’s heavy tropical humidity, moisture rising from the riverbank, structural ground movement, and the relentless presence of termites meant any standard Western subfloor would warp or rot in months. I had to invent a resilient multilayer assembly from scratch. It incorporated raised moisture barriers, passive perimeter ventilation channels, tailored dampening pads, and termite treatments to support wide, luminous planks of specially imported Canadian maple. It yielded effortlessly underfoot, providing dynamic rebound on every spin and drop, its warm golden grain the only colour set against our gallery white walls.

Beyond the dance floor lay the studio’s most striking and enigmatic feature: an indoor lap pool lined entirely in black granite. Although it was only 1.2 metres deep, the deep black stone made the water appear bottomless, like a still, dark void carved into the earth. The pool was separated from the dance floor by a colonnade of columns, each proportioned strictly to the Golden Ratio. Overhead, skylights cut through the ceiling, repeating that exact same rhythmic proportion. This geometric harmony between light, stone, timber, and water created an intangible aura, a clean, positive spiritual energy that resonated through the whole building. Even if you were not dancing, simply sitting in the space made your pulse slow and your mind settle.

INNERTIME was never a public venue, nor was it ever intended to be. This was the late 1990s, an era long before social media, digital location tags, and websites removed the mystique from the world. We had no street signage and ran no advertising. The school existed as a whispered enigma, a secluded sanctuary that people in the dance community knew of, but rarely knew how to reach.

Admission was strictly by referral, and sessions were held exclusively by appointment. Reaching the studio was part of the journey. It sat tucked away on what was then the quiet, less developed side of the river, hidden deep within a network of narrow, winding lanes. Students would regularly travel two hours across Bangkok just to get there, and some arrived by longtail boat, stepping straight from the river and through our doors.

The waiting list grew long, driven by the absolute scarcity of our time. The school had only two instructors: myself and my competitive dance partner. Between our intense daily training schedule to maintain our form at the top of the international circuit, and my daytime work practising as an architect, our teaching hours were tightly constrained. We offered only a handful of sessions each week. At 1200 Baht per 45 minute private lesson, a substantial figure in Thailand in the late 1990s, I became the highest paid dance teacher in the country.

The school was only active for a few short years. Life moved forward, and I eventually needed to close the doors and return home to Australia to begin a new chapter. That brief lifespan, however, preserved its integrity. It never had the chance to age, compromise, or fade. Decades later, INNERTIME remains a pure, untouched memory of a moment when architectural discipline and physical expression met in complete

harmony.