A blend of wood and bamboo, built on stilts, the Khmer Loeu house is a solid construction perfectly adapted to its environment.
Of varying size but identical layout, it always consists of a communal section forming a terrace where visitors are received and where people gather in the evening.
It is accessed by a small wooden ladder. The private quarters are generally distributed on either side of the terrace in the case of the long house of an Austronesian tribe, or behind and on one side only if it is a Mon-Khmer type house.
Among the Austronesians, where a house can shelter several families, each household has a bay spaced between two pairs of columns, with (relative) privacy ensured by bamboo partitions.
There is generally one hearth per household, each possessing its own domestic utensils.
People sleep with their heads to the East, where the spirits reside; it is along the eastern wall of the house that the jars of rice alcohol, which constitute one of the household’s riches, are stored.
Mon-Khmer type houses are certainly the most beautiful since they are decorated on their pediment with geometric decorative motifs made of woven bamboo and specific to each tribe: lines, grids, chevrons, diamonds… alternately representing the cricket’s jaw, the toucan’s beak, the kapok tree’s leaves, the buffalo’s teeth, etc.
These motifs are also found in the basketwork of carrying baskets, weavings, and carvings adorning familiar objects.