The lagoon transformation, responding to the land’s contours and to a functioning water-sensitive system.
Hotel Indigo Bintan centers its 4.9-hectare resort on a living lagoon that filters, cools, and defines experience. Terraced wetlands, canopy corridors, and bio-engineered water loops merge performance with calm beauty, proving that technical precision and aesthetic can coexist along Bintan’s transforming coast.
Sectors
Services
Landscape Architecture
Collaborators
Tierra Design
Architect
Where land folds into lagoon, a resort learns to breathe with water
The 4.9-hectare site on Bintan’s coast unfolds between sand, breeze, and canopy. Hotel Indigo Bintan is conceived as a living landscape where architecture, hydrology, and vegetation co-author a resort that cools, filters, and flourishes through the rhythm of water.
The site of Hotel Indigo Bintan is both unique and rare coastal gem
Bauxite-rich soils were acidic and compact, rainfall intense, and tides unpredictable. Runoff carved gullies and eroded slopes; planting struggled to root. To realize a restorative resort, the landscape needed to perform technically, stabilizing, draining, and regenerating, while maintaining the calm aesthetic expected of coastal hospitality.
The lagoon became both system and soul
Hydrological design frames the resort around a central freshwater lagoon that receives, filters, and recycles all surface flow. It is the ecological core, stormwater infrastructure, microclimate moderator, and reflective heart of guest experience. Terraced edges stage wetlands and bio-filters; native coastal species re-root degraded soil. A sequence of courtyards, palm groves, and lagoon boardwalks choreographs movement from canopy shade to water edge. Technical systems, bioswales, retention basins, irrigation loops, disappear within sensory experience. Ecology is not backdrop but narrative: a resort breathing through its lagoon.
Earthworks sculpted the lagoon before any foundation rose
Subsurface channels and bio-based filters manage stormwater, enabling closed-loop irrigation. Layered vegetation, riparian, transitional, canopy, anchors soil and modulates humidity. Bridges and decks hover above variable waterlines, their structure timed with tidal shifts. Material palettes echo the site: porous stone, hardwood, stainless detailing for salt resistance. Over months the system stabilized; the lagoon cleared, the canopy thickened, and the resort found equilibrium between performance and stillness.
The lagoon now mirrors not only the sky, but the discipline beneath it
Hotel Indigo Bintan demonstrates how hospitality can regenerate its ground. Stormwater that once escaped now circulates through engineered wetlands; vegetation that once wilted thrives in balanced salinity. Guests move through layers of climate — dry deck, shaded grove, misted bridge — experiencing comfort as an ecological outcome, not decoration. The project collapses the distance between beauty and operation: every reflection carries data, every plant participates in hydrology. As the landscape matures, the resort becomes both classroom and sanctuary, proving that coastal luxury can coexist with scientific precision and environmental empathy.
