AKAYA Resort

Project overview

AKAYA sits on a riverside site near Gokarna, on the Karnataka coast. It is a nature-oriented resort on about 10 acres, built around 10 ferrocement dome cottages instead of conventional rooms, with a swimming pool, a restaurant and a community centre for guests. The cottages come in four sizes — roughly 400, 600, 800 and 1,000 sq ft — so the resort can offer a range of stays. Each is a ferrocement shell with a distinctive dome form, curved in every direction, with door and window openings and a tunnel-form entrance shaped into the geometry.

PBJ Infra has been developing the project for about 1.5–2 years: planning and building the cottages and dome structures, the hospitality facilities and the supporting resort infrastructure that ties them into an existing coconut and areca grove. It applies the ferrocement dome and ferro concrete design technique across a whole resort, carried out of Maharashtra to the Karnataka coast.

Client requirement

The brief was a destination that would offer guests a comfortable and genuinely unusual stay, planned around the natural setting rather than imposed on it — which is what led to domes set among the trees rather than a block of rooms.

The challenge

Repeating a thin-shell dome across a resort is harder than building one. Each shell still has to be set out, reinforced and mortar-applied by hand, but now to a consistent standard across ten cottages in four different sizes, on a sloping coastal site with laterite soil and an existing tree canopy to work around. The tunnel-form entrances and larger openings had to be reinforced and built into each shell from the start, and the cottages had to be positioned for privacy and drainage without clearing the grove.

PBJ’s approach

PBJ treated the domes as a repeatable structural system. Shell geometry, mesh layering and mortar mix were designed for the cottage types and then reproduced unit by unit, with the openings and tunnel entrances set into the formwork rather than cut later. Site works — levelling, edge retaining, paths and drainage — ran alongside the shells so the grove and the contours were kept largely intact.

Construction / execution

Each dome is built up over formwork and an armature: layered steel mesh, then cement mortar applied and compacted in controlled layers, then curing, external weather-coating and internal finishing. The resort was built in five phases, with the cottages completed in sequence while laterite paths, retaining kerbs and planting were laid in between. The project has been in development for about 1.5–2 years and is now in its final stage of construction and finishing.

Project details

• Location: Gokarna, Karnataka
• Site: approx. 10 acres, riverside setting
• Accommodation: 10 ferrocement dome cottages — approx. 400, 600, 800 and 1,000 sq ft
• Facilities: swimming pool · restaurant · community centre
• Development period: approx. 1.5–2 years, in five phases
• PBJ scope: end-to-end execution — construction, finishing and site development
• Status: final stage; completion expected late 2026

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