This week it’s all about wood

This week, I’ve been forced to think about wood. Wood and trees. Did you know that we grew our own wood to build the resort? In fact, we built the resort because we had the wood… It’s a long story and I’ll post it separately one of these days.

So, back to the past week. Our BRISC (Batu Batu Reef & Island Study Centre) partners Wild Asia and architects Ian and Kheong made an excursion onto Pulau Tengah over the weekend to look at the site and plan out the space. One of my activities over the week was to prepare a design brief. We have logs ready (pinus caribaea) to build the structures and so I’ve been looking for images of open and airy raw wood structures and found a few lovely examples. The first from Danielle de Lange’s Style Files  (a great resource for lots of beautiful design ideas) – a holiday home in SW France.

And then I chanced upon Danielle’s new blog Travel Files and the most lovely Uxua Casa Hotel on Brazil’s Bahian coast. More ideas to play with.

The architects’ exploratory trip was fruitful and it’s been very exciting to see BRISC taking shape (conceptually). On Tuesday, I found these in my inbox – maps of trees on the site and a first draft plan showing how BRISC will be designed to occupy space around and between the trees. Unfortunately, a handful of trees will have to come down.

But then, yesterday afternoon I had lunch with some new friends – Mel and Natanel who had heard about Batu Batu and wanted to meet. Natanel (Gluska) has just arrived in Singapore from Zurich and is an artist who makes beautiful things from wood (often whole trees). An image of his studio in Zurich and work below.

Isn’t it uncanny that all of these things came together at the same time? I don’t know yet whether the to-be-culled trees will one day metamorphosise into pieces of art – but I’ll keep you updated!

Loving the R.R. House (Brazil)

In researching and writing the architects brief for the long beach structures today (beach bar & BRISC), I came across this very cool seaside summer house near Sao Paulo, Brazil. Designed by Andrade Morettin Arquitetos, it’s basically a very beautiful giant mosquito net house which allows cross ventilation but stops the insects from getting in. It also glows at night. I like the idea of having BRISC look something like this amongst the casuarina trees behind our long beach…

Dave Bakewell’s Birds and Rock Pools

I wanted to point you towards a blog post by Dave Bakewell about a long weekend spent at an evolving Batu Batu with ourselves and some other friends from Wild Asia last month. Dave is a Wild Asia Associate and “birder” / bird specialist / enthusiast / expert based in Malaysia and has taken some great photos of birds in-and-around Pulau Tengah. He’s also taken some very good pictures of the island’s tidal reef or rock pools (all taken from above water). Do take a look – Dave’s post has the actual names and descriptions of the birds so I’ll leave you to investigate further there.

I’ll post more in the not-too-distant future about the weekend and the birth of BRISC (Batu Batu Reef & Island Study Centre) – a very exciting project! Until then – enjoy some of these lovely photos (stolen from Dave’s blog – thanks Dave!).

And one last pic of the BRISC founding team leaving the Pulau Tengah (as Reza points out – shame that Dato CJL was taking the picture and didn’t get into the pic or we’d have had 3 generations of BB/BRISC).

From left to right: Rastam (one of our head-builders), Mei, Dave, Chew, Mathieu, Cher, boatman, Winelyn, Dada, Shiya and Reza.