A resort masterplan is a plan for how people will feel over the course of a week, expressed as roads, levels, buildings and planting. That is a harder brief than it sounds, because almost every decision that determines the experience is taken before any building is designed, and most of them are effectively irreversible once infrastructure is in the ground.
Coastal sites make it harder still. The shoreline is the asset, the reason the project exists and the most heavily constrained part of the site, and the temptation to spend it badly is considerable.
The shoreline is finite
Every coastal resort masterplan is a negotiation over a scarce commodity. There is a fixed length of beach, and there are more things that want to be on it than can be.
The developer's instinct is usually to place the highest-value accommodation directly on the water. Done without restraint, this produces a continuous wall of villas along the shoreline, which achieves two things: it maximises the number of premium units, and it removes any relationship between the rest of the resort and the sea. Guests staying fifty metres inland experience a development that has turned its back on the reason they came.
The alternative is to treat the shoreline as shared. Public and semi-public functions occupy part of it, views are borrowed across it from further back, and the premium units are fewer but genuinely exceptional. That yields less beachfront accommodation and a substantially better resort, and the decision between the two is a commercial one that the masterplan makes on the client's behalf whether or not it is discussed explicitly.
Making it explicit, early, is the most valuable thing a masterplanner can do on a coastal site.
Levels do the work that walls cannot
The most useful tool in resort planning is the section. Where a site has any topography at all, modest changes in level allow accommodation set back from the water to see over what is in front of it, which converts second-row units from compromised to desirable.
Level changes also solve privacy without fences, screen service routes without hiding them behind walls, and create the sense of arrival and descent that a good resort uses to separate the world outside from the world inside. On a flat site all of this has to be manufactured, and manufacturing it is expensive, which is a reason to establish early whether the topography can be worked with or must be created.
Distance is the operational constraint
Resorts are horizontal buildings. The same servicing requirements that a city hotel resolves with a service lift are resolved here across hundreds of metres, and the masterplan determines how far everything has to travel.
Food has to reach outlying restaurants at temperature. Housekeeping has to service the furthest villa. Waste, laundry and deliveries have to move without crossing guest routes. Staff have to arrive, change and disperse. All of this is decided by where the back of house sits and how the service network reaches the accommodation, and all of it is set at masterplan stage.
The failure mode is recognisable. A resort where every guest journey involves a buggy, where restaurants underperform because they are inconvenient, and where the operator's running costs are permanently higher than modelled, is usually a resort whose plan was drawn for aerial views rather than for walking distances.
A simple discipline helps: test the plan by walking it. Room to restaurant, room to beach, room to spa, and the equivalent service routes. If those distances are unreasonable on a drawing, they will be unreasonable in forty degrees of heat, carrying a child and a bag.
Phasing is a design decision, not a programme decision
Few resorts are built in one go. Most are phased, and a masterplan that has not been designed to be phased will produce a first phase that feels like a building site with guests in it.
Phasing well means each phase is complete in itself: its own arrival, its own amenity, and a boundary that reads as an edge rather than as an unfinished join. It also means the infrastructure for later phases is planned from the start, because retrofitting a service spine through an operating resort is disruptive in a way that costs bookings.
This is one of the areas where masterplanning and commercial strategy are inseparable. The sequence in which a developer wants to release product and the sequence in which the site can sensibly be built are not automatically the same, and reconciling them is masterplan work.
Climate shapes the plan, not just the buildings
In hot climates the masterplan determines whether the resort is usable outdoors at all. Orientation relative to prevailing wind and sun, the width and shading of routes, the placement of water, the density and species of planting and the provision of shaded stopping points all decide whether the space between buildings is inhabited or merely crossed at speed.
Prevailing breeze is worth particular attention, because it is free and because blocking it is easy to do by accident. A row of buildings placed across the prevailing wind will still the air behind it for the life of the resort.
Landscape is structure
On a resort, landscape is not decoration applied at the end. It provides shade, defines routes, screens service areas, separates public from private and establishes the character of the place more than the architecture does.
It also takes time to mature, which argues for planting early and designing around what the landscape will be at year ten rather than at handover. A resort that depends on mature planting for shade and privacy, and opens with none, is a different product from the one that was designed and will be reviewed as such.
Species selection in an arid coastal environment is constrained by salt, heat and water availability, and those constraints should shape the landscape concept from the beginning rather than reducing a lush drawing to what will actually survive.
The environment is a constraint and an asset
Coastal sites frequently carry environmental sensitivities: marine habitat, dune systems, protected species, water quality. These constrain building lines, drainage and how the site can be built, and they have to be established before a plan is drawn rather than discovered against one.
They are also, increasingly, part of the product. A resort that can demonstrate a genuine relationship with its setting has something to say that a resort which flattened its site cannot. Treating environmental constraint as an early design input rather than a compliance hurdle tends to produce both a smoother project and a better place.
Common misconceptions
"Beachfront accommodation should be maximised"
A continuous wall of villas along the shoreline removes any relationship between the rest of the resort and the sea. Treating the shoreline as shared, with fewer but genuinely exceptional premium units, usually yields a better resort.
"A flat site is simpler to plan than a sloped one"
Modest changes in level let accommodation set back from the water see over what is in front of it. On a flat site the same effect has to be manufactured, at real cost.
"Phasing is a scheduling question, not a design one"
A masterplan not designed to be phased produces a first phase that feels like a building site with guests in it.
"Mature landscape can be added once the resort opens"
Planting takes years to mature. A resort that depends on it for shade and privacy and opens with none is a different product from the one that was designed.
What a developer should settle first
- How is the shoreline allocated between private accommodation and shared use?
- What is the maximum acceptable walking distance from room to the principal amenities?
- Where does back of house sit, and how does the service network reach the furthest accommodation?
- How does the project phase, and is each phase complete in itself?
- What does the topography offer, and what must be created?
Our masterplanning portfolio includes Khmissat Aghroud, a coastal resort masterplan on Morocco's Atlantic coast, The Dunes on the Senegalese coast, Petra Jordan Island on The World in Dubai and The Wave Masterplan in Abu Dhabi. Four coastlines, four regulatory frameworks, and the shoreline-allocation question above answered differently on each — which is the argument for settling it deliberately rather than by habit.
For how the masterplanning discipline holds its value over time, see masterplanning in the Gulf. For the operational requirements that resorts must satisfy, see hospitality architecture in the UAE. If you are planning a resort or coastal development, get in touch.