High Rise Luxury Hospitality

Client

Baccarat

Year

2025

ARCHITECTURE

work completed while at HKS

The Challenge

To design towers that stand at the threshold of a future destination envisioned as one of the region’s most ambitious cultural and entertainment playgrounds. The site rises along a crescent-shaped cliff edge, a place where the land falls away into vast, unbroken views. The challenge was to create architecture that responds to this extraordinary terrain with sensitivity and restraint.

The project required a design that could mediate between two worlds: the resort core below and the emerging masterplan to the east. Orientation, height and proportion needed to serve more than performance; they needed to honour the landscape. Every decision was shaped by the desire to frame views, protect privacy, and capture the quiet drama of the site’s natural contours.

Local geomorphology became both guide and muse. Its layered forms, carved over time, demanded towers that were slender, elegant and grounded in the language of the cliffs themselves. The concept stage explored three façade expressions, each interpreting the spirit of place through rhythm, texture and light.

The challenge was clear: to craft vertical forms that feel inevitable to the land they rise from.

View Results

work completed while at HKS

The Results

The resulting design is a pair of sculpted towers that belong to the terrain rather than standing apart from it. Their placement along the cliff line ensures uninterrupted views across the expansive surrounding landscape, offering every residence a profound sense of arrival, openness and connection to the horizon.

Each tower is composed with quiet confidence. Slender silhouettes echo the surrounding geological forms, while subtle shifts in massing respond to wind, sun and sightlines. The architecture reads as an extension of the cliff itself, rising with poise and tapering with intent.

The façade studies explore a palette of elegant, vertically driven expressions that capture the play of shadow throughout the day. These options allow the towers to move between soft fluidity and more pronounced sculptural depth, all while maintaining a timeless, refined clarity. The chosen façade will evolve into a fully resolved architectural language that blends environmental performance with emotional resonance.

The result is a design that frames the landscape rather than competing with it. A landmark shaped by story, site and atmosphere – crafted to feel as though the earth has simply lifted to meet the sky.