The first of two hotel projects in my degree. A resort on a hillside in the Mount Slamet highlands, planned around a four-storey hotel block, cottages and cabins, pools, a restaurant, a timber hot tub and a playground. The programme logic carried straight into my 4-star graduation project in Jepara.
Context
Guci is a highland tourist area on the slopes of Mount Slamet in Tegal, Central Java, known for its hot springs. In 2020, as a studio project in my architecture degree at Diponegoro University, I designed a 3-star resort hotel for it: the first of the two hotel projects in my degree, followed a year later by the 4-star beach resort in Jepara that became my graduation project.
I designed it as a student under studio supervision, from the site plan to the renders. It remains a studio design.
The site
The resort sits on a hillside plot reached from a winding access road. The site plan puts the main hotel block by the entrance, next to the pools and a children's play area, with a central car park and clusters of cottages and rows of guest units spread across the rest of the slope, held by stone retaining walls.
The hotel block
The main building is a four-storey hotel block with a recessed, glazed ground floor. Its facade combines vertical fins with gold patterned screens and planted ledges, and it looks out over landscaped pools.
Cottages and shared spaces
Beyond the hotel block, guests stay in cottages with pitched roofs and in A-frame timber cabins with their own decks. The shared spaces are designed as destinations of their own:
- A restaurant with a timber canopy and outdoor seating along the resort street.
- A round timber hot tub under a woven timber canopy that frames the mountain view.
- A children's playground beside the pool, within sight of the hotel.
Lessons
Hotels are logistics with a view. Back-of-house routes, service access and room-count arithmetic set the plan before any facade idea appears, and learning that on a 3-star project made the 4-star one much faster.
Planning a hospitality project?
I am happy to talk about design and visualisation.
Questions people ask
- A 3-star resort hotel for Guci, Central Java, designed by Nugraha Labib Mujaddid in 2020 as a studio project at Diponegoro University.
- A hillside site plan, a four-storey hotel block, cottages and A-frame timber cabins, pools, a restaurant, a timber hot tub and a children's playground.
