Master Planning

Master planning is where a vision becomes a place, setting the relationships that hold it together: how land and movement work with each other, how public life and private retreat stay in balance, how a destination grows over time without losing what makes it singular.

“By the time a guest reaches the door, they already know what kind of place they've come to. That happens in the master plan, long before anything is built.”

Tareq El Zayat,

Chief Executive Officer, EMEA

At OBMI, master planning begins with the experience a place should create. The decisions that give a destination its character, the sequence of arrival and the moments of compression and release, are made at master plan stage or not at all.

This is the same hospitality intelligence that runs through each of our disciplines, though at this scale it means something broader than guest experience and commercial performance. It means the public realm: how community forms, how the spaces between assets work as well as the assets themselves, and how a place holds together for the people who will live in it and pass through it.

Without that thinking underneath it, master planning becomes moving pieces around a board without asking why any of them are there. We order the relationships that govern a site so they hold up to that question, creating environments that are coherent at scale, feasible to build and operate, and human in detail. Because OBMI has often stayed with a development as it has grown, we plan with a clear sense of what sustains a place over time, not only what establishes it.

Master planning can be engaged on its own, or sequenced out of Strategic Advisory or into Architecture. A client receives a master plan precise enough to govern every decision that follows, and robust enough to hold as the place evolves across decades.