Rosewood Little Dix Bay, Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands · Caribbean

Little Dix Bay curves along an 800-metre crescent of white sand on Virgin Gorda, the third-largest of the British Virgin Islands, sheltered by green hills and a reef-fringed bay. Laurance Rockefeller opened it in 1964 as an early eco-conscious island retreat, a low-built resort of angular cottages set among the palms, and its standing was quickly established: Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip visited during their 1966 tour of the territory, two years after the resort opened. Generations of guests have returned since, passing the place on to their children. When Rosewood took the resort forward, the task was to modernise it without losing what kept those guests coming back.

OBMI led the architecture of the renovation as part of a resort-wide upgrade. The guiding principle was fidelity to Rockefeller's original vision: the redesign had to honour the appearance and the low-impact intention of his 1964 resort while bringing it up to contemporary standards, so the work built on the existing angular forms and kept them. The resort still reads as a small number of low structures dotted among the vegetation, private cottages set discreetly into the landscape with minimal disturbance to the ground they sit on.

Hurricane Irma had struck the island in 2017, so OBMI's experience in the Caribbean hurricane belt shaped the resilience built into the new work, carried through the structures without disturbing the barefoot, low-impact character that defines the place. The environment was treated as the resort's principal asset throughout.