Resort Design in India: Sustainable Luxury at Avhyay Resort

Resort design in India is undergoing a quiet but profound shift. The era of generic five-star uniformity is giving way to a new appetite for resorts that feel rooted in their landscape, their culture and their craft — resorts that offer not just luxury but a sense of place. Few projects express this shift as clearly as Bricolage Bombay’s redesign of Avhyay Resort, a 12-acre hospitality estate set at the edge of the Tungareshwar forest near Mumbai.

As an architecture and interior design studio in Mumbai, we approach resort architecture as an exercise in storytelling through material, landscape and heritage. This article uses Avhyay to explore what sustainable, experience-led resort design looks like in contemporary India.

Designing a resort around its landscape

Originally built in 1985, Avhyay Resort had grown outdated, an accumulation of buildings constructed by different architects over the decades with little coherence. The owners approached Bricolage Bombay for a complete redesign focused on sustainable materials and a deeper connection to nature. Our starting point was the 12-acre site itself — its trees, its light, its edge against the Tungareshwar forest. Great resort design begins with the landscape, not the building, and at Avhyay every architectural decision was made to blur the boundary between indoors and the lush outdoors.

A reception that tells a story

The reimagined reception sets the tone for the entire resort. We extended the existing structure with elegant steps and a welcoming arrival sequence, crowned by a striking mandala-patterned ceiling, with fountains on either side of the entrance creating a serene, almost ceremonial ambiance. A glass-enclosed extension floods the lobby with natural light and dissolves the line between the built interior and the greenery beyond — a hallmark of climate-responsive resort architecture in India.

The reception desk, designed by Vinit Nikumbh, is the emotional centrepiece. Behind it, a backlit wall showcases traditional Indian fabric patterns in a warm glow. Most remarkably, the desk itself was crafted from six carefully restored doors sourced from a Jain Derasar (temple) in Bhavnagar, Gujarat, along with reclaimed column brackets and bases — turning a functional piece into a work of art and a piece of living heritage. This is sustainable luxury in its truest sense: not new materials made to look old, but genuine architectural salvage given a second life.

Sustainable materials as a design philosophy

Throughout Avhyay, the material palette is deliberately natural and low-impact: stone, wood and natural mud plasters used prominently to reinforce the resort’s connection to its surroundings while showcasing traditional Indian craftsmanship. The custom furniture, crafted in a distinctive turntable style, blends modern geometry with natural materials. By avoiding resource-intensive finishes, the design demonstrates that eco-conscious resort design and luxury hospitality are not opposites — in fact, the tactility and warmth of natural materials read as more luxurious, not less.

Hospitality as a sequence of experiences

A resort is never a single building but a constellation of experiences, and Avhyay includes a family of spaces designed as a coherent whole — from the reception’s Coffee Karma counter, branded and designed by Bricolage Bombay, to the Maricca Restaurant, cafe, cottages and hotel rooms across the estate. Designing a resort means choreographing the guest’s journey through these spaces so that each arrival, meal and moment of rest feels intentional. The most successful resort projects in India treat food and beverage, accommodation and arrival as chapters in a single narrative of place.

Why heritage-rooted resort design wins

Today’s discerning traveller — whether at a forest resort near Mumbai or a beach property in Goa — is increasingly drawn to authenticity over anonymous opulence. Resorts that engage local craft, regional materials and cultural memory offer something a global hotel chain cannot: a reason to be here, in this specific place. For resort owners and developers, this is also sound commercial strategy. Distinctive, sustainable, story-rich design is what earns press, drives social sharing and commands premium rates.

Resort and hospitality design services in India

Bricolage Bombay offers comprehensive resort design, hotel interior design and hospitality architecture services across India — from forest and hill resorts near Mumbai and Pune to beach resorts and boutique villas in Goa, Maharashtra and beyond. Our hospitality practice spans resort master planning, reception and lobby design, restaurant and bar interiors, cafe and coffee-counter branding, guest rooms, cottages and suites, spa and wellness spaces, banquet and event venues, and landscape-led arrival sequences.

We specialise in sustainable, heritage-rooted hospitality design that uses natural materials — stone, timber, lime and mud plasters, reclaimed and salvaged architectural elements, and locally sourced craft — to create resorts with a genuine sense of place. For resort owners, hoteliers and hospitality developers seeking eco-conscious luxury, biophilic design and experiences that command premium room rates and earn editorial coverage, our approach treats every property as a story to be told through architecture, interiors and landscape together. The Avhyay Resort redesign near Tungareshwar is one example of how thoughtful, climate-responsive resort design can transform an outdated property into a destination.

Bricolage Bombay is a Mumbai-based architecture and interior design studio specialising in resort design, hospitality architecture and sustainable, heritage-led spaces across India. Explore our hospitality work or speak with us about your resort or hotel project.