Biome Environmental Solutions buries Gamaya Farms eco-resort under stone

An 854-square-metre eco-resort near Hyderabad has been designed to disappear. Architecture studio Biome Environmental Solutions covered Gamaya Farms with a hill-like roof of local stone and walls of compressed earth bricks, hiding the resort inside its site in the town of Vikarabad, India.

"Gamaya Farms redefines architectural iconism not through bold geometry, but through absolute camouflage and tectonic erasure," director Anurag Tamhankar told Dezeen.

The resort is a series of individual guesthouses and farm plots organised around a shared amenities block. Rather than one big building, Biome split the program across the land.

"Rather than treating the program as a monolithic footprint, the master plan deconstructs the traditional resort layout into distinct, site-specific architectural typologies," Tamhankar said. "Taking cues from the surrounding hills and forest to create an intervention that transitions out of the ground, the design disperses the program across decentralised pockets of the land, offering distinct sensory experiences."

What does the central pavilion contain?

A curved, single-storey pavilion sits at the centre of the site. Its western end holds the main entrance and reception, which lead into a large multi-purpose hall and dining room, plus utility areas and bathrooms.

Large circular windows puncture the exposed earth-block walls and fill the spaces with light. Above them, the vaulted, hill-like roof shades the interiors and extends north to shelter a paved terrace.

The roof's construction is unusually direct. Workers applied shotcrete — sprayed concrete — over chicken and weld mesh, then topped it with a layer of unworked local rubble. Rows of large arched openings puncture the vault.

In front of the pavilion, four guesthouses sit partially sunken into a slope. Narrow, dark entrance stairs open into bedrooms with large north-facing windows.

"The subterranean cottages, sunk into the ground, preserve the expansive view from the pavilion, while getting their own private views," Tamhankar explained.

What rises at the forest edge?

Further out, toward the wooded perimeter, stand two Forest Pavilions. These cylindrical guesthouses perch on concrete stilts, reached by spiral staircases in yellow-painted steel.

Their lower levels contain bathrooms lined in smooth, curved plaster. Above, circular bedrooms are wrapped in glazing and open onto a balcony with yellow-painted railings.

"The isolated forest cottages are tucked into the woodland perimeter, with a 360-degree view of the forest canopy," Tamhankar added.

Gamaya Farms joins a growing run of low-impact Indian resorts, including The Earthen Retreat by AKSH Architects — a cluster of small abandoned buildings coated in mud and lime plaster — and Serenity by Ma+rs, distinguished by its thatched roofs. Together they point to a hospitality market that increasingly sells absence, not presence: buildings that read as landscape first.