Every winter, Goa’s beaches flood with tourists seeking a place to relax and enjoy a sense of the beauty within its virgin beaches. However permanent hotels are only allowed a couple of hundred meters away from its beaches. On the other hand, temporary huts are commonplace right on the beach.  To accommodate free roaming adventurists who would rather sleep on the beach then in a five star resort, a massive yearly construction activity of temporary beach shacks takes place right before the tourism season.

This generates an enormous amount of yearly construction waste. To avoid this, the beach cabins for Dunhill Beach Resort were designed in a component system. Every component can be disassembled and re-assembled year after year.

Modular Construction

As the attractiveness of the resort is the experience of the beach, these unique cabins are kept compact at 4 by 4.5 meters. It has basic facilities of a shower, basin, toilet and cupboard at the back. The bedroom faces the beach view. The removable electrical wiring is incorporated in grooves in the timber columns and beams.  Unlike the other temporary shacks built and broken down after the tourist season, these structures are completely reusable without unsustainable material and labor waste.

The structure is clad on all sides with elegant timber screens with diagonally symmetrical corner details.  Rather then complying with the known notion of what a cabin should look like, the cabins appear as abstract objects scattered on the beach. This is emphasized even more at night. In the darkness, the gaps between the slats of the screens make the cabins appear like floating lanterns.

Cabin on beach amongst palm grove

Agonda Beach, south Goa

The Dunhill Beach Resort is located on a palm groove planted by the owners on a plot fronting the unspoilt beach of Agonda.

Designed in a system where every component could be disassembled and re-assembled again year after year.

The super structure is made of a light framework of locally available Sagwan timber of 100 x 50mm sections with demountable joints on a grid of 500 x 500mm.

A multilayered polycarbonate roofing sheet is fixed with a clip on system and reduces the weight to be supported on the framework.

Drawings

Plan

Elevation

Section

Elegant timber screens with diagonally symmetrical corner details

internal partition wall and the columns of the four poster bed reduce the span of the beam construction.

The framework is filled with a horizontal timber screen of tapered 60 x 20mm Fishtail palm sections.

Reflection of beach – a double layer of glass and open timber screen around the bedroom.