AVISA: A Tulou-Inspired Eco Resort Where Sanya's Land Meets the Sea

Q: Who wrote "AVISA: A Tulou-Inspired Eco Resort Where Sanya's Land Meets the Sea"?

This article was written by UNI Editorial and published on uni.xyz, a platform for design professionals and creative thinkers.

Q: What is "AVISA: A Tulou-Inspired Eco Resort Where Sanya's Land Meets the Sea" about?

This article covers topics related to Eco-Tourism, Conceptual Architecture, Educational Building. Circular courtyards, bamboo screens and rammed earth shape a People's Choice resort in Hainan that treats wellbeing and ecology as one spatial system.

Most resorts sell escape by sealing guests off from the place they came to see. AVISA does the opposite. It asks whether tourism can deliver comfort and rejuvenation while easing, rather than adding to, the pressure on its surrounding ecosystem. Its answer is architectural: circular planning borrowed from the Chinese Tulou, passive climatic design, bamboo, rammed earth and stone, biological water treatment and productive landscapes. Together these turn accommodation, recreation, food, mobility and wellbeing into a single connected system instead of a cluster of isolated luxury buildings.

Designed by Vanshika Speedy, Rahul Raj, Vedika Arora and Satya Sai Sanathan, the project received a People's Choice Award in Footprints 2020. The site sits in the tropical coastal landscape of Sanya, Hainan, in southern China. The name comes from a Sanskrit expression the team reads as a place "where land meets the sea", and that meeting of earth, water and air runs through every part of the scheme. The designers frame the resort as a refuge from the digital saturation and psychological pressure of contemporary urban life, with architecture serving as a framework for restoration.

Interiors Built from Timber, Brick and Hanging Bamboo

Rendered loft interior with stepped timber stair, brick tile balcony edge and a seated figure beside a suitcase and potted plants

Rendered view of a curved dark timber staircase rising beneath a ceiling of hanging bamboo poles, with visitors on the pale floor

The interiors make the material argument before any plan does. A loft room steps up on a timber stair to a balcony edged in brick tile, with potted plants softening the threshold between sleeping and lounging. In the second view, a curved dark timber staircase rises beneath a ceiling of suspended bamboo poles. The bamboo is not decoration hung over a conventional shell. It becomes the ceiling itself, filtering light and giving the vertical circulation a rhythm drawn from a fast-growing, locally resonant material.

This matters because the brief the team set themselves depends on touch. Their narrative describes rammed-earth surfaces that ground the body and bamboo screens that temper sunlight. These renderings show those ideas carried into the rooms guests actually occupy, rather than left as gestures on the facade.

Curved Rooms for Gathering, Reading and Listening

Rendered curved library with teal shelving, hanging wicker pod chairs and a reader below a timber ceiling

Rendered stone amphitheatre with tiered seating and a standing speaker, sunlight falling across the tiled floor below a timber gallery

The Tulou reference becomes most legible in the shared spaces. The library bends along a curved wall of teal shelving, with wicker pod chairs suspended beneath a timber ceiling, so the room wraps around its readers instead of lining them up. The stone amphitheatre pushes the same geometry into civic form: tiered seating descends toward a tiled floor where sunlight lands, overlooked by a timber gallery. The team does not copy the historic earthen roundhouses. They extract enclosure, communal focus and inward-facing organisation, then apply those principles to resort programmes.

The approach avoids nostalgia because the circle earns its place. In a resort meant to restore people, a room that gathers inward does social work, and the amphitheatre gives guests a reason to sit together rather than retreat to private suites.

A Courtyard Organised Around a Living Tree

Rendered bedroom with a white geometric lattice screen behind the bed, bamboo wall cladding and a potted palm beside a ceiling fan

Rendered stone courtyard with a spiral steel stair wrapping a living tree trunk, as two seated figures talk on a sofa

The bedroom pairs a white geometric lattice screen with bamboo wall cladding, and a ceiling fan and potted palm signal a room that relies on moving air in Sanya's heat and humidity. The courtyard beside it may be the most memorable image in the set: a spiral steel stair winds around the trunk of a living tree while two figures talk on a sofa below. The tree is not relocated or framed in a planter. The circulation bends to it.

That gesture captures the project's central claim that nature should shape spatial organisation rather than ornament it. It also shows the courtyard as a climatic device. In the designers' account, the central open spaces of the circular blocks encourage airflow and provide sheltered areas for gathering. This one does both while giving guests a vertical route through the canopy.

Arrival, Villas and an Elevated Birdwalk Through the Forest

Rendering of a curved reception block with a domed volume behind, seen past a stone gate pillar with palms and cars on the driveway

Rendering of timber-clad villas beside a elevated vine-covered birdwalk, with cyclists on a path below and a tower in the distance

At the scale of the site, the curved reception block announces the circular language as soon as guests pass the stone gate pillar, with a domed volume rising behind it among the palms. The villas then shift register. Clad in timber, they sit beside an elevated, vine-covered birdwalk, while cyclists move along a path below. This layered movement, with people on foot overhead and on bicycles at grade, extends the boardwalks and treehouses the team describes threading through mature vegetation.

The result treats mobility as part of the landscape experience instead of a service layer. Guests move slowly, outdoors and among planting, which reinforces the restorative intent far more convincingly than any spa menu could.

Why This Project Matters

AVISA takes on a building type that is often among the most extractive in coastal regions and reframes it as an ecosystem. Its strength lies in coherence: biological pools, productive landscapes, passive ventilation and natural materials are presented as parts of one system that shapes how guests sleep, gather and move, rather than as a checklist of green features. The renderings back this up at every scale, from the bamboo ceiling over a stair to the birdwalk above the bike path.

Its use of the Tulou offers a useful lesson for young designers working with vernacular references. The team avoids reproducing an image and instead translates enclosure, communal courtyards and climatic shelter into a contemporary hospitality programme. The People's Choice recognition at Footprints 2020 suggests that audiences respond to this kind of clarity: a resort that offers its guests rest by putting them back in contact with the land, the sea and one another.