One&Only Set to Open on Desaru Coast
Kerry Hill Architects is behind the newly opened One&Only Desaru Coast, a tropical modernist resort infused with traditional Malaysian vernacular
The late architect Kerry Hill will always be remembered for his intellectual discipline, refined taste and unapologetic mania for the straight line — a predilection that showed up time and again in his firm’s broad portfolio of residences and resorts, among them Amanwella in Sri Lanka, Martin No.38 in Singapore and COMO The Treasury in Perth.
But nowhere is this clearer than in One&Only Desaru Coast, the latest in a stream of projects to emerge from Kerry Hill Architects since Hill’s passing in August 2018.
Set on 128 acres of prime beach frontage on Malaysia’s south-east corner, the 45-key all-suite resort is vast, rigorously slick and features an abundance of arrow-straight walkways, sand-hued stone walls, and terraces.
The aesthetic may belong firmly to the school of tropical modernism, evolved by Geoffrey Bawa and honed by Hill over the decades, but a closer look reveals a spatial palimpsest inspired by the traditional Malay kampung (village), particularly in the way the resort is anchored by a central courtyard and a 50-metre-long pool, from which green-fringed pathways spike outwards towards the individual timber-clad villas.
A quiet Malaysian vernacular permeates the resort, especially in the interior design (for which Kerry Hill Architects are also responsible). The villas, for instance, are dressed with local stone and yellow balau timber alongside handcrafted silk songket pieces, their intricate pattern of flowers softly offset by chequered floor mats of hand-plaited rattan vines harvested from local rainforests.
Enwrapping this bucolic tableau is a dense green cocoon that bristles with native fauna including sea eagles and hornbills. If the landscaping of mature banyan, Penaga laut and jambu laut trees seems unusually established given that the resort only opened in June 2020, it’s because the architects were careful to preserve as much of the original vegetation as they could. ‘From an environmental standpoint, we wanted to be as respectful to nature as we could,’ says Justin Hill, director at Kerry Hill Architects. ‘This was a priority in our master planning, from minimising tree loss to keeping the site as clean as possible during construction.’
This concern for the natural environment was present in every step of the design process, even as the architects strove to draw the eye beyond the treeline out to the South China Sea and, in particular, the resort’s one-and-a-half-kilometre stretch of snowy white beach.
Project co-leader Angelo Kriziotis recalls that early in the masterplanning, the team ‘resolved to retain as much of the strip of natural beach foliage as possible and to create a sheltered zone between the resort and the coastline.’ This, Kriziotis adds, has resulted in the beach being left in its natural state while the buildings appear to recede into the forest, so that the lawns between the coast and the resort become protected and park-like. ‘When walking on the beach, the resort is almost entirely hidden by the canopy of coastal vegetation. There’s a real sense of being at one with nature.’
I like to imagine that, somewhere, Kerry Hill — an architect who strove his entire career to dovetail the built environment with nature — is nodding with approval.
Text / Daven Wu
Images / Courtesy of One&Only Desaru Coast
