by Zach Mortice
Assistant Editor

How do you . . . create a luxury resort that embraces local ecology?

Summary: The Fairmont Mayakoba is a luxury resort on the Mayan Riviera that maintains and uses the area’s natural ecology to give guests a vacation experience steeped in native flora and fauna. Developed after an extensive and multidimensional study of the natural landscape, the resort lessens its environmental impact by being constructed from native and recycled materials.

Alongside the nearby Cancun hotel mega-developments, the Fairmont Mayakoba in the rapidly developing Mayan Riviera can seem small, oddly sited, and inconspicuous. Boutique in style if not size, it’s two-story, stand-alone units offer no traditional resort ocean views and are hidden away in dense mangrove forests.

This isn’t at all by accident, but is instead the key to the identity of the Fairmont Mayakoba. It’s a luxury hotel on the Yucatan Peninsula that works with local ecology to place visitors in a tranquil, rustic, and isolated jungle setting. The open and breezy four-unit standalone bungalows bring lush mangroves up to the windows and the ocean (the actual coast is a quarter mile away) to the doorstep through a series of languidly curving lagoons. The experience is light years away from the high-rise cinderblock vacations offered by Cancun hoteliers, even though the Fairmont is only 42 miles to the south. The Fairmont Mayakoba is a development that shrinks into its setting and encourages interaction with the natural, unspoiled environment instead of boasting commanding ocean views atop skyscrapers.

“The goal in this project was to take what would be in program a 400-unit property and make it feel like it was 200 rooms,” says Gary Koerner, AIA, the lead designer for the project and President of the Dallas-based architecture firm three. “The jungle helped us with that.”

A part of the jungle
Because of this commitment to keeping the natural environment intact, the development is surprisingly green for a luxury hotel complex. “This whole site was about ecology,” says Koerner.

three designers used a deep-red native wood called sapote in the interiors, exteriors, and on railings. To further reduce the carbon footprint of the development, they also quarried from the building site a cream-colored limestone for the bungalows. The resulting units are an easy and airy balance of thatch-roofed tropicalism and dark-wood decadence. Instead of steamrolling a thin strip of coastline, three and the site’s developers (Madrid-based OHL) left the local ecology as intact as possible by having builders hand-machete the surrounding mangroves to prepare sites for construction. “We wanted the guests to submerge themselves in the jungle,” says Koerner. And to submerge themselves in the local fauna; herons and cormorants abound, and manatees float in the lagoons equipped with GPS trackers for their protection, according to Travel + Leisure.

Koerner and three modeled the development after the native Mayan tradition of separating private residence and public areas. Like the Fairmont Mayakoba, ancient Mayan villages designated one part of town for public spaces, like temples, while residences were tucked away separately in the mangroves. At the Fairmont Mayakoba, visitors are brought to the central main building, which houses restaurants, meeting spaces, and administration offices. It peaks over the tops of the trees and surrounding jungle, offering the coveted and required resort ocean view. Guests are then taken to their secluded casita in the mangroves by appropriately green means via electric golf cart, bicycles provided by the hotel, or (perhaps the resort’s most striking feature) a custom-made mahogany gondola, or lancha, that floats along a series of canals linking the resort together.

Six-year study
This comprehensive approach to maintaining the natural environment is the result of OHL’s exhaustive six-year study of the ecology of the area. Their team, which included architects, biologists, hydrologists, engineers, and tourism experts, formulated a plan and set of criteria for how to work with the natural flora and fauna, in some cases transplanting and grafting thousands of native trees and flowers.

Koerner says this type of green-focused development is rare in Mexico, but the allure of native authenticity at luxury resorts has been so successful that, according to Travel + Leisure, Cancun hoteliers are re-branding their developments to be part of the Mayan Riviera. Completed in October 2006, the Fairmont Mayakoba is the first of six planned developments, and though the resort might revel in its illusion of self-effacing smallness, this desire for eco-friendly intimacy is big and growing.