Kirubeli Cove Retreat

Architects: OTLA
Area: 24,394 ft²
Year: 2022–2026
Photography: OTLA (Kashyap Bhagat, Krish Shah, Megha Yadav)
Structural Engineering: Dolomite Structures
MEP Consultants: ESVE Designs Pvt. Ltd.
Lighting Design: Lirio Lopez Lighting Design
Materials: Laterite, granite, timber, reclaimed hardwood, lime plaster, red clay, terracotta, steel, and concrete
Location: Kagala, Karnataka
Country: India

Kirubeli Cove Retreat is an extended-stay hospitality project by OTLA set within the ecologically sensitive coastal terrain of Kagala in North Karnataka. Conceived as a phased development, the retreat combines guest apartments, prefabricated wooden cabins, staff housing, a restaurant, and a library within a 9.8-acre site characterized by estuarine backwaters, forested slopes, and a secluded beach. The project responds directly to the environmental character of the Aghanashini river basin and to the restrictions imposed by Coastal Regulation Zone guidelines, which have informed a combination of permanent and temporary construction methods. The retreat is organized through a series of low-impact interventions that aim to preserve existing hydrological systems while enabling long-stay accommodation rooted in wellness, leisure, and immersion in the landscape. OTLA utilizes stone walls, platforms, retaining structures, and lightweight pavilions to integrate architecture into the terrain rather than impose upon it. Across its various components, the project reflects a consistent interest in ecological regeneration, adaptive planning, and craft-based construction that aligns hospitality with the rhythms, materials, and communities of the coastal setting.

We began the design by formalizing and restoring a set of spaces of worship – sacred spots on site revered by the fishermen and their families. They already had a certain presence in the form of a singular stone in a thicket of vegetation, or a loosely inscribed stone platform, or a random rubble retaining wall holding a small shed to pray. This is where the project started from – random boulders of granite and laterite were sourced locally, quarried from the ground of the region. This itself anchored the design into its context, made for the land and from the land.

Interview with Kashyap Bhagat and Krish Shah of Studio OTLA

Kirubeli cove retreat / otla

Kirubeli Cove Retreat is defined less by the idea of a singular building than by a carefully calibrated relationship between landform, settlement, and occupation. Set between the foothills of the Western Ghats and the estuarine edge of the Aghanashini basin, the project approaches architecture as an instrument for inhabiting a fragile coastal territory with restraint. OTLA frames the retreat as an extended-stay environment for rest, leisure, prayer, and adventure, but its deeper proposition lies in how these programs are distributed across the site as a loose constellation of built elements that respond to topography, water movement, vegetation, and the regulatory limits of construction on the coast.

The setting is central to the project’s architectural logic. The cove is enclosed by forested cliffs and animated by tidal shifts, monsoon runoff, shallow waterways, and a landscape of coconut, cashew, jackfruit, and casuarina trees. A small fishing settlement and a long-standing system of wells and water catchments further establish the site as a place whose inhabitation has historically depended on close environmental knowledge. Rather than flattening or abstracting this context, the retreat draws from it directly. The design begins with hydrological repair through the revival of an old stormwater channel and the creation of a primary bund-like artery across the property to moderate runoff from the forested slopes above. This infrastructural intervention becomes the basis for a broader landscape strategy in which architecture, drainage, circulation, and ecological regeneration are inseparable.

The Kirubeli Cove Retreat Masterplan is developed in two phases and combines multiple building types. Phase I includes four guest apartments, three pre-fabricated wooden cabins, and staff housing. Phase II adds seven more pre-fabricated cabins, a restaurant, and a library. Across the site, OTLA introduces a family of stone elements that range from retaining walls and load-bearing supports to benches, parapets, freestanding planes, and platforms. These inserts perform both practical and spatial roles. At times, they stabilize uneven ground or form the bases for lightweight structures. Elsewhere, they simply register occupation in the landscape, offering moments of pause beneath the tree canopy or framing movement toward the estuary. This recurring stone language gives the retreat continuity while allowing each component to respond to a distinct site condition.

The guest apartment building occupies a particularly charged position within the project because it stands on the footprint of a dilapidated old load-bearing house and became the only permissible permanent structure within the Coastal Regulation Zone. OTLA uses this condition not as an exception to the retreat’s overall sensitivity, but as an opportunity to humanize a pre-designed concrete frame through material and spatial transformation. The remains of the earlier structure, including laterite debris and red clay, were carefully retained and reintroduced into the new building. Laterite stone from local quarries forms a textured masonry skin, while pigmented clay plaster made with stone dust ties the lower surfaces back to the earth. The result is a building that suppresses the rigidity of its concrete frame in favor of a heavier, more tactile reading, as if it were emerging gradually from the ground.

Programmatically, the guest apartment block functions as a communal house within the retreat. The kitchen occupies the ground floor, while four guest apartments are placed on the upper levels to take advantage of views across the estuary. Open corridors to the east and balconies to the west turn circulation into an elevated encounter with the surrounding trees and shifting coastal light. At the top, a semi-open timber pavilion wraps a central courtyard and opens to panoramic views, serving as a shared living room for yoga, dining, gathering, and quiet retreat. In contrast to the low-slung disposition of much of the masterplan, this vertical element becomes a lookout and anchor, although it remains visually subdued within the thicket of coastal vegetation.

If the guest apartments express permanence under constraint, the pre-fabricated wooden cabins represent the project’s most direct response to the temporary construction logic required by coastal regulation. Positioned across a historically low-lying paddy field and sandy laterite terrain, the cabins are designed to perch lightly on stone follies distributed through the site. These foundations are not neutral plinths but landscape devices that reshape access, support, and use. They become ramps, retaining edges, seating platforms, and shaded outdoor rooms beneath the raised cabins. In this way, the accommodation type is inseparable from the ground strategy that enables it.

The cabins are conceived as modular structures adaptable to different terrains, heights, and modes of occupation. Organized either as intimate clusters or as individual units, they accommodate a range of guest experiences while maintaining a consistent tectonic system. Crafted from reclaimed Bangkirai hardwood and developed in collaboration with Indonesian craftsmen from central Java, the cabins draw upon traditional timber knowledge while addressing the demands of monsoon exposure, coastal salinity, and disassembly. Their construction is divided into four parts: stone footings and follies, inner structure, outer structure, and roof. Sliding wooden walls mediate between enclosed and open space, allowing the interiors to expand onto decks during milder seasons and retreat into a more protected shell during harsher weather. The asymmetric hip roofs, lined with pre-fabricated ironwood shingles, complete a system that is at once robust, reversible, and finely detailed.

A different but equally significant dimension of the retreat is found in the staff housing and back-of-house area, which OTLA treats not as a hidden service annex but as a small settlement with its own internal coherence. Set on a steep one-acre parcel behind the main retreat, the complex accommodates housing for 35 to 40 staff members, a general manager’s suite, and support spaces including changing rooms, laundry, storage, a staff kitchen, a library and lounge, and a bio-methanation plant. Here, the architecture emerges from a precise shaping of the slope into a series of terraces retained by laterite walls and embedded service volumes finished in red soil plaster. Lightweight stilted steel dormitories and residences then sit atop this newly formed terrain, creating a layered village-like environment structured by courts, stairways, and circulation platforms.

The staff compound extends the project’s central themes in a more infrastructural register. Its courts serve as points of exchange between the back-of-house operations and the guest-facing retreat. Its terraces organize daily life around movement, work, gathering, and rest. Even the uppermost service level, which houses water storage and food-waste conversion infrastructure, is folded into the spatial logic of the settlement. Rather than separating labor from leisure through architecture, the project acknowledges the operational life of hospitality and gives it an environment shaped with comparable care.

Throughout the retreat, OTLA maintains a consistent commitment to making architecture subordinate to ecological continuity. The design does not rely on spectacle or formal isolation. Instead, it gains force through repetition, calibration, and the slow construction of relationships between stone, timber, earth, water, and vegetation. Granite and laterite walls recur as both structure and landscape marker. Pigmented plasters and reused clay deepen the connection between building and ground. Timber pavilions, decks, and cabins remain light enough to accommodate shifting environmental and regulatory conditions. Even the revived shrines, developed with guidance from a local priest and realized with boat-makers and artisans, indicate that the project understands place not only as terrain but also as memory, ritual, and inherited practice.

Kirubeli Cove Retreat presents hospitality as a form of stewardship rather than extraction. Its architecture is shaped by the acceptance that the cove is already a complete environmental system and that building within it requires tact, reversibility, and attention to long-term regeneration. By working through phased development, local material cycles, crafted construction, and a distributed masterplan, OTLA produces a retreat that is less a finished object than an adaptive framework for inhabitation. In this sense, the project’s coherence lies not in uniformity, but in the way each component participates in a larger territorial and ecological conversation.

Kirubeli cove retreat / otla

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