Hotel Sun Coast

Hotel Sun Coast
Commercial Hotel · Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh · 2012

Hotel Sun Coast stands on a 10-katha plot in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh's principal beach resort city, where the proximity to the sea is the building's most significant asset and its most demanding environmental condition simultaneously. The salt air, the coastal wind, and the intensity of the reflected light from the Bay of Bengal are not incidental to the architecture here. They are the conditions against which every material and spatial decision must be tested.

The facade is organised as a deep concrete grid, its square bays reading from the street as a regular matrix of frames that give each guest room its own defined threshold between interior and the coastal air outside. Within each bay, warm timber-clad balcony volumes project forward, their rich material tone contrasting with the pale concrete frame and introducing a domestic scale to what would otherwise be a monolithic hotel elevation. The timber deepens in colour over time with exposure to the coastal climate, the building aging into its setting rather than resisting it.

The grid logic produces a facade of considerable depth, each room sheltered by the projecting concrete frame of the bay above, so that the balconies are naturally shaded without the need for additional shading devices. The structure itself mediates the climate. Planted vegetation runs down the vertical channels between the bays, building a green skin that softens the concrete geometry and adds a further layer of thermal buffering.

The ground floor steps back behind a colonnade of exposed concrete columns, lifting the building's inhabited mass above the street and creating a shaded public threshold at the point of entry. The rooftop carries a planted terrace, its canopy of trees and greenery visible from the street below as a crown of living material above the gridded tower.