Beyond the magnanimity of the Western Ghats, the Aghanashini river basin unfolds a complex layout of shallow waterways into the Arabian Sea. These rivers running into the basin bring nutrient rich waters down from the Ghats. Thus, nurturing an abundant ecosystem, supporting large wide areas of shrimp and clam farms, paddy fields and aquaculture. These backwaters are the result of the estuary close to the ground land trapped between a slightly raised coastal belt and the last vestiges of the Western Ghats which tumble into their waters.

Editor’s Note: In the emerald embrace of the Western Ghats, where the Aghanashini whispers ancient secrets, Otla rises not as an intrusion, but as a quiet breath of the land itself. Raw laterite, reclaimed timber, and stone follies dance with mist and monsoon, crafting a sanctuary where architecture dissolves into nature’s wild poetry. A home that heals, listens, and belongs.

A Retreat Nestled In The Western Ghats Stands Out For Its Raw Nature | OTLA

A Hidden Cove at Land’s End

Nestled within a densely forested coastal belt in the Western Ghats, the cove lies beyond a hillock. It rests quietly at the land’s edge, offering a secluded and serene environment. Here, cross-sea waves from the Aghanashini estuary lap gently against a sable-soft beach. Two forest cliffs, 350 meters apart, dramatically drop into the sea to form this cove.

A Village Cradled by Jungle and Sea

Just a few hundred meters from the beach, a thicket of coconut, cashew, and jackfruit trees marks the jungle’s edge. Behind it, a dense wall of forest rises, enveloping and protecting the entire expanse of the cove. Anchored onto the Laterite bedrocks at the foot of the hillock, lies a small village settlement called Kirubeli.

This fishermen settlement of about eight families thrives on a unique ecosystem and the sponge-like tapering cliffs. These cliffs absorb monsoon rains, recharge underground aquifers, and create a topography of fresh water wells at the cove.

Where Wellness Meets Wilderness

The vision for the land is based on studying the terrain and preserving the ecosystem through sensitive, regenerative design interventions. The business model creates extended-stay spaces for immersive nature wellness. They partner with local communities who have nurtured this wetland for millennia.

Due to Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) guidelines, much of the design uses temporary prefabricated timber post-and-beam structures. Because there was an old, dilapidated mud-plastered house, they allowed a pre-designed RCC framed structure on the same footprint.

Designed with Nature, Guided by Wisdom

The project begins by reviving the age-old stormwater channel, creating a main artery that controls run-off and prevents flooding. Guidelines from a local priest inspired the revival of historic shrines using granite and timber, crafted with boat-makers and artisans.

The Gateway Between Jungle and Sea

As one drives through the jungle thicket of the western ghats, two angled ‘shilekallu’ stone walls mark the retreat’s entrance, with a small opening. Through this opening, a stone-paved pathway meanders along the forest fringe, leading south toward the estuary and accommodations.

Walls That Shape Space and Silence

A series of these granite and laterite walls sprawl through the design; simple follies and sculptures strategically positioned within the landscape. These stone inserts subtly embrace the surroundings, sometimes as load bearing walls supporting light pavilion roofs, or a low parapet, forming an elongated seat to lay under the swaying canopies of coconut trees.

Some simply remain as free-standing walls, loosely inscribing spaces around the built structures. As one traverses amidst these walls, a quiet, cuboidal form dressed in laterite and red clay emerges from the ground.

Living Across Levels of the Estuary

With a permissible height of nine meters and a clear opening through casuarina and coconut trees, the building integrates naturally. The lower floor houses the main kitchen, while the upper floors host guest apartments with estuary views. A semi-open timber pavilion crowns the structure, completing the building’s design.

The loosely surrounding stone walls create a forecourt to the building, housing a quaint pre-fabricated timber pavilion as the library. The kitchen extends into a seamless dining space, flanking the building on either side.

Envisaged as a communal entertainment space for the retreat, the lightweight timber flanks surround beachfront coconut and casuarina trees. They shade a stone-paved court that opens seamlessly onto the beachfront.

Nature’s Gradual Transformations

As we move southwards, just behind the beach, a low-lying area—historically a paddy field—sits protected by cashew trees. The beach landscape transforms with sandy shores, casuarina trees as windbreaks, and intimate groves of coconut trees.

With careful consideration of the shifting terrain, they embed nuanced interventions of stone follies into the landscape. These take the form of elongated landings, platforms, bund walls, and in-built benches. These inserts become points of pause, a moment to immerse and embrace the phenomenal natural wealth.

Pre-fabricated wooden cabins offer a unique experience of stay and comfort, lightly perching onto the stone follies. They repurpose the follies as accessways, foundational supports, retaining walls, or ramps.

Just beyond the east boundary, along the water channel, a skewed strip of land juts out, connecting steeply sloped land. Amidst coconut and mango trees, this compact site houses the staff and back-of-house amenities. It is directly connected to the main artery of the retreat.

A Retreat That Breathes with the Land

Envisaged as a physical release from urban life, the design subtly fits into its surroundings. It brings the ever-changing ecology of the estuary prominently to the forefront. These interventions belong and catalyze the natural regeneration of the land. Almost like a palimpsest, the design provides an adaptive framework that modifies and evolves over time. It embraces the land and its elements, continually adding layers to itself.

Guest Apartment

Guest Apartments with Elevated Views

As the only permissible permanent structure in the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ), the retreat placed its main kitchen on the ground floor. The upper floors take advantage of the 9-meter height, housing four guest apartments with balconies offering expansive estuary views.

The design aims to sensitize the daunting concrete framework, inhabiting it with light, nature, and the coastal terrain. Reimagined as a blanket of earth, the structure emerges as a sculpture, reusing laterite debris and red clay from the old walls.

Iterative Use of Local Laterite Stone

An iterative design process using customized laterite stone from local quarries created a skin of paper-cut stone masonry on the surfaces. They used the dust from dressing the laterite stone to make a pigmented clay plaster, embedding the structure into the ground.

Free-standing granite walls, informal low parapet walls, elongated stone benches, and a lightweight deck loosely surround the building. These elements enable moments of pause, rest, and interaction—almost like a forecourt to a house.

A Communal Home as the Organizing Concept

The notion of a communal home organizes the design, with a forecourt, a kitchen and dining space, private apartments, and a timber pavilion. With semi-open corridors on the east and balconies on the west, the designers plan the apartments as transitional spaces within the changing landscape.

Elevated Circulation Embracing the Terrain

Strategically positioned openings provide glimpses of red terracotta floors and lime-plastered walls, adorned with wooden furniture and pink marble counters. The corridors and balconies embrace the surrounding terrain, acting as elevated circulation planes that enable interaction with trees and landscape while ascending.

Open Corridors Leading to the Terrace Pavilion

These open corridors lead to the terrace pavilion. A lightweight timber structure inscribes a central open courtyard and frames a 360-degree view of the surrounding landscape. The pavilion serves as an intimate living space for guests, hosting yoga, dinners, entertainment, or quiet tea on breezy evenings.

Sensitive Integration with the Landscape

Considering the fragility of the land’s ecology, the guest apartment design attempts to humanize an otherwise daunting structure. The building merges into the ground, hidden behind casuarina and coconut trees, gradually revealing glimpses of ever-changing red.

Wooden Cabins

Hidden between the Western Ghats foothills and the sandy estuarine bank, an age-old paddy field meets the Aghanashini River and Arabian Sea. This paddy field is a sandy laterite water catchment, annually flushed with rainwater from hills to the north, south, and east.

Prefabricated Wooden Cabins within the Master Plan

As part of the master plan at Kirubeli Cove, prefabricated wooden cabins are designed to gently perch on stone sculptures and follies. These stone sculptures are strategically placed and planted throughout the sandy terrain.

Stone Follies as Dynamic Focal Points

Serving as focal points throughout the site, these stone follies transform the landscape, creating a dynamic environment for guests to explore. Organized as intimate clusters or individually, the cabins provide boutique accommodations for the extended-stay eco-retreat at Kirubeli Cove.

The cabin design aspires to innovate with modularity at its core, imbued with the ability to cater to varying site conditions, terrains, heights, users and social interactions. Following the land and landscape, these cabins are consciously located in varying formats responding to their immediate context.

Use of Indigenous Bangkirai Hardwood

Using an indigenous species of reclaimed hardwood called Bangkirai, abundant and native to the Indonesian islands, the prefabricated timber structure has been engineered along with a team of Indonesian craftsmen and artisans based out of the central Java region. This species of wood is long tested in tropical terrains, embracing the strong winds, monsoons and salinity of coastal climates.

Modular Cabin Components with Dismantlable Joineries

The design evolved through the course of an iterative exchange of ideas and details informed by the knowledge of traditional Indonesian woodworking and the study of Indian coastal architecture. The cabin typically comprises of 4 components brought together with a dismantlable system of wooden joineries, maintaining the temporary nature of construction required by the coastal regulations of India:

Curated Underside Spaces for Outdoor Living

The wooden columns are mounted onto the stone footings with varying heights that have been adjusted in relation to the terrain around in order to ensure uninterrupted and exclusive views of the beach and the estuary. The underside of the elevated cabins have been curated with stone follies, outdoor furniture and paved in granite stone to allow for a spillover space hosting an intimate breakfast, a family dinner or just a shaded silent zone for enjoying the coastal breeze on a hammock.

The inner structure/skeleton circumscribes an intimate, private space with amenities and functions consciously interspersed and convertible. The study table is in a guarded corner positioned against the sliding wooden wall to allow one to directly gaze at the surrounding landscape.

Sliding Walls for Seasonal Adaptability

This wall slides open onto the outer decks during cozy winter months and closed off during harsher climates. The bed and lounge spaces are screened behind sliding wooden paneled walls. These walls can be expanded seamlessly onto the lavish front decks.. The outer structure functions as a protective layer against harsh monsoons. It also acts as the semi open buffer for spillover activities and utilitarian requirements.

The asymmetric hip roof is externally lined with pre-fabricated ironwood shingles. This age-old roofing material is commonly used by Indonesian timber workers. A durable roofing system with a fast installation process was developed in collaboration with the craftsmen.

Fusion of Traditional Craftsmanship and Modern Prefabrication

While the cabin robustly combines traditional Indonesian craftsmanship with modern prefabricated architecture, its elegance lies in simplicity and careful detailing. It also reflects in-depth material research and optimal use of technology.

Staff Cabin

Abutting the main vehicular artery of the Kirubeli Cove Retreat, discreetly tucked behind the pool area, a small strip of land leads the way to the lower slopes of the hilly forests protecting the cove. Set on the lower vestiges of this forest, a compact 1 acre parcel of land, with a dramatic slope of 14 meters; is nestled within a thicket of age-old coconut and mango trees. With subtle modifications and widening of a direct vehicular access from the upper slopes, the site houses the dormitories, residences and communal areas for an in-house staff strength of 35-40 people, the general manager’s suite, along with the back-of-
house amenities of the serviced retreat.

Sculpting the Land through Back and Fill

A detailed study of the terrain, compactness of the site and the dramatic slope, rendered a delicate curation of terraces amidst the density of the forest. The design of the project emerges from this calculated surgery of back and fill, the process of a very fragile sculpting of the land. Laterite walls retain these platforms, partly carved into or enveloping proportioned blocks of mass covered in a pigmented red soil plaster.

Sculpted Landform Connectivity

Housing the services and back-of-house amenities such as changing rooms, staff kitchen, laundry and store, these blocks seamlessly become a part of the topography, some embedded, some gently rising from the ground, all connected through staircases and platforms created through a shaping of the ground– almost like a sculpted landform.

Landform as the New Topography

This landform becomes the new topography of the land, lightly accommodating spaces of rest, eat, leisure, movement, entertainment and fitness. Envisaged as a village or a settlement in itself, the staff dormitories and residences – in the form of lightweighted, stilted steel structures come and sit atop this terrain, strategically positioned to enable circulation, interaction and community.

Vehicular Access and Spatial Exchange

Inscribed on the lowest terrace, a large court serves as the main communal space and buggy movement area. It extends to a tilted dining area and buggy parking, acting as the primary exchange between back-of-house amenities and guest accommodations.

Laterite Staircase as Private and Functional Access

Connected through a laterite staircase embedded into the ground, the second terrace becomes a private access to the general manager’s suite – extending as a narrow piece of flatland, leading to the laundry and the staff library and lounge on the other side. Ascending from under the female dormitories, this staircase continues to lead the way to the third terrace. This terrace serves as the service entrance and parking for the staff village, connecting the main access road coming down from the top of the hill.

Upper Terrace Utilities

As one moves further up towards the dormitories, a small, intimate courtyard sets itself under the vastness of an ancient mango tree. Basking in a drizzle of dappled light, this courtyard becomes the thoroughfare for the male and female dormitories and an intimate space for conversation and leisure. The upmost terrace houses the water storage tanks and a bio methanation plant to convert the retreat’s food waste into cooking gas for the staff kitchen.

Imagined as a community within itself, the staff housing is envisioned to be an intimate, self-sustaining neighborhood, discreetly tucked into the forest. The design attempts to seamlessly fit into the terrain – an approach where a negotiation with the land dictates the architecture, making it inseparable from ground and earth.

Fact File

Designed by: OTLA

Project Type: Residential + Hospitality Design

Project Name: Kirubeli Cove Retreat

Location: Kagala, North Karnataka, India

Year: 2022 – 2026

Built Up Area: 24,394 Sq.ft

Land Area: 9.8 Acres

Principal Architects: Kashyap Bhagat & Krish Shah

Design Cresits: Megha Yadav

Photograph Courtesy: OTLA

MEP Consultants: ESVE Designs Pvt. Ltd.

Lighting consultant: Lirio Lopez Lighting Design

Firm’s Website Link: OTLA

Firm’s Instagram Link: OTLA

For Similar Project >>> This Aesthetic Courtyard House With Lush Landscape Design Offers A Calm Aura To The Users