Guanacaste, Costa Rica

Reda Amalou and Stéphanie Ledoux of AW² Architecture Workshop’s eco-lodge is not a hotel, but a part of nature.

Built on timber platforms from natural materials, it leaves no scar on its landscape.

Kasiiya Papagayo Resort Hotel won a recent 2021 Green Good Design® Award from The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athenaeum.

From the very beginning, the conservation of the tropical forest has been paramount. The company’s intention throughout the project was not to have minimal impact on the environment, but zero.

This project in Costa Rica has propelled architecture and the boutique hotel experience into a new dimension, or one might say a new ecology. Its luxury and exceptional elegance may well lie in cultivating a new relationship with the world, more secretive, more respectful, and more genuine as well.

Architecture and nature can live in symbiosis rather than in opposition, without one trying to gain ground over the other. Kasiiya is the application of this concept.

Meticulously positioned amidst 123 acres of a wild landscape, Kasiiya was a challenging project in many senses. The developer provided a clear brief for a boutique eco-lodge where the design should merge, should disappear into the surrounding nature without damaging it.

The firm’s concept stems from the idea that there should be no frontier between architecture and the surrounding wilderness, between the inside and the outside.

This boutique eco-lodge covers 2,000 m² and contains 14 tents, a beach bar, restaurant, spa, and communal spaces. It is composed on the scale of a village, made up of clusters of tents, densifying the habitat in some areas and then letting nature take the full rein in others.

Constructed from mainly local natural materials, each tent offers its guests total comfort with bespoke furniture designed by the practice.

Accessible from a private path, each tent is carefully orientated to reconnect with nature alone. Inside the tents, the camping mindset continues. The demountable character, both fragile and impermanent, is affirmed everywhere.

In terms of materials, local wood was sourced for the structures and interiors. The tents are constructed from mainly natural materials on timber frame platforms. Each one offers its guests total comfort and ultimate privacy.

Kasiiya Papagayo was completed without cutting down a single tree and without the use of concrete and nails.

Kasiiya was designed to be 100% solar-powered, the water is drawn fresh from an on-site well, and all vehicles used on the property are electric. Kasiiya is a discrete invitation to question the company’s sedentary civilization, a type of return to simple pleasures.

This eco-concept removes the seasoned luxury traveler from their comfort zone and succinctly resumes the project’s grounding philosophy: appreciate the Earth without consuming it.

Project: Kasiiya Papagayo Resort Hotel
Architects: AW² Architecture Workshop
Design Team: Reda Amalou and Stéphanie Ledoux
Client: Kasiiya Group
Photographers: Kenny Viese