We kept the trees and built around them

Greenova was a coffee estate before it was anything else, and in most of the ways that matter it still is.

The plantation had been left alone for the better part of a decade when we found it. The forest had begun taking it back — silver oak through the terraces, hornbills in the canopy, a leopard that the neighbours insisted was a rumour until the camera traps said otherwise.

The obvious move was to clear and start again. Instead we spent a year mapping every tree over six inches, and then designed twenty-four rooms into the gaps between them. Not one was felled. The buildings sit on stilts because the root systems came first, and the paths bend because the trees would not.

The coffee is still harvested. The kitchen garden feeds the restaurant. The spring feeds the spa. Guests arrive expecting a hotel and leave describing something closer to a household — which is, more or less, what we were aiming for.