Architecture has always been interested in movement — in the promenade, the procession, the journey through space. But buildings, by definition, stay still. The guest moves through them. Sir Tuffy inverts this relationship: it is architecture that moves, carrying its guests through the landscape of the Chapora River and the Arabian Sea, making the journey itself the experience. For Bricolage Bombay, designing the retrofit of an old wooden boat was the most unexpected and illuminating project in the studio’s history — because everything the team knew about space, materiality, and human experience had to be applied to an object that would, after completion, sail.

Sir Tuffy began as an old river boat purchased by Carrick Bend Realty for use as a guest ferry at the Riviera resort in Morjim. The vessel had good bones — a traditional wooden hull with the particular character that only age and use can produce — but required comprehensive interior and exterior work before it could serve the resort’s hospitality ambitions. Bricolage Bombay undertook the full design of the boat’s retrofit: deck, cabin, bar, seating, and materiality.

The choice to execute the entire boat in real timber was deliberate and expensive, in both cost and craft terms. The main deck and top deck were completed in acacia wood, sourced from the northern coastal regions of Maharashtra around Sawantwadi — a timber known for its durability in wet environments and for the warmth of its grain and colour. The secondary joinery was executed in Asondal, a local wood species, contributing to the material specificity that distinguishes Sir Tuffy from the generic fibreglass and marine-ply of most resort vessels.

The cabin of Sir Tuffy is a compact marvel of space planning: a small steering area with a polished brass wheel, an engine room accessible below deck, and a social cabin furnished to serve guests during the river crossing from the Chapora’s mouth to the Yacht Club. Forward of the cabin, the front deck provides open-air seating for guests who want to feel the river air directly; above, a rooftop deck equipped with loungers offers the most elevated and panoramic experience of the journey. Both outdoor decks are designed in acacia wood, unifying the boat’s material vocabulary from bow to stern.

The miniature bar and kitchen installed within Sir Tuffy’s cabin are perhaps the smallest hospitality spaces Bricolage Bombay has ever designed — a challenge that required the same precision and rigour as the largest projects in the portfolio. Every millimetre matters when the available space is measured in centimetres. The result is a tiny, perfectly functioning service counter from which guests can order drinks as the Goa coastline unfolds around them.

The detailing throughout Sir Tuffy — dark wood polish, brass fittings, carefully placed brass patties at key junctions — gives the boat the character of a vessel from another era: not a replica of something old, but a genuinely crafted object that carries the spirit of traditional boatbuilding into the contemporary luxury context. Sir Tuffy is, in the deepest sense, an architectural object. It demonstrates that the principles of good design — careful material selection, honest construction, respect for human proportion, attention to experience — apply equally to buildings that move and buildings that stay still.