Fly by every night

For Ashley Sutton, Bangkok's golden boy of bar design, art is long, life is short, and so is his attention span. The feted creator of Iron Fairies, Clouds, Mr Jones' Orphanage, Five, Maggie Choo's, and fish and chips saloon Fat Gut'z is a restless, questing soul, never satisfied, always searching.

Sutton professes scant regard for his creations, says he couldn't care less about running bars anymore - "s***holes" is how he refers to them. As soon as the paint is dry on the latest Sutton special, the heavily-inked Freemantle native with the Australian Rules footballer's physique, matinee-idol looks, fierce vodka thirst, raging insomnia and potty mouth is done, done and on to the next one.

Fortunately for Hong Kong's more discerning barflies, the "next one" but one (he first has to open Bangkok Betty, a new military-themed diner in the Holiday Inn on the corner of Sukhumvit Soi 22) is a bigger, better incarnation of Iron Fairies to open mid-2014 in a yet-to-be-revealed location in Central. The original Iron Fairies in Bangkok's trendy Thong Lor district was a jazz-soaked, absinthe-drizzled, hard-boiled steampunk wonderland of a bar, which made Sutton an overnight sensation in Bangkok and saw the great and good begin queuing up to secure his services.

Sutton conceived the Iron Fairies mythology while driving cranes and digging mine shafts in Western Australia's rugged Pilbara region. "You'd be underground for so long you'd just about lose your mind," he recalls. "I started thinking about fairies, and then I started doing some sketches." Then he lost part of his left hand in an accident (not his drawing hand).

He visited China, set up a foundry in Dalian, and cleaned up selling wrought-iron ware to Australian yuppies. His sales manager saw his fairy sketches, urged Sutton to turn them into a book, and the rest is history.

Now a three-volume set which has sold more than 200,000 copies in four languages, part journal, part poetry and part mystery, revolves around the adventures of a group of miners who live in tunnels amid the rich red ore of the Pilbara. One day, the miners begin making fairies, which exist in a state of suspended animation until they are touched by the first rays of the morning sun. Each fairy has a name, the wings of an insect, and a poem that details its provenance.

Sutton briefly opened prototype Iron Fairies bars in Perth and New York, before settling on Bangkok to perfect the concept. Entering Iron Fairies in full swing is always a trip: workers bustle about with files and moulds, leather aprons flapping. The titular fairies are everywhere, coarse yet delicate, dense yet ethereal, dusted in a delicious patina of rust and verdigris. A wrought-iron staircase spirals to nowhere and a New Orleans jazz band swings. Hand-tooled leather books spin fairy legends. Patrons dine on the kind of hamburgers you find in Australian milk bars and sip absinthe.