There is a particular quality of light on the Bay of Bengal in the early morning. It arrives sideways, oblique and salt-softened, landing on stone and water with the same even-handedness. The architects who designed Taj Puri in Odisha understood this before they drew a single line. Their first decision was not about form. It was about air.
The resort, completed in 2024 on a five-acre site in Puri, is the work of HBA India and Singapore, the Asian studios of Hirsch Bedner Associates, one of the world’s foremost hospitality design practices. Known for work that moves between the global and the deeply local, HBA brought to this project a full spectrum of expertise, from masterplanning and architecture through to interior design, art curation, graphics, and wayfinding. What that breadth produced here is not a resort that feels designed in the conventional sense, assembled from a palette of recognisable moves, but one that seems to have arrived at its form by listening.
The reception is deliberately porous, a threshold rather than an enclosure, cross-ventilated so that the breeze does the work that mechanical cooling would otherwise do. The rhythms of the coast enter with you the moment you arrive. This is not an amenity. It is an argument: that architecture, when it listens carefully enough to its climate, can become something close to effortless.
That same attentiveness shapes the masterplan across every scale. The site steps and aligns itself so that the horizon over the Bay of Bengal is visible not only from terraces and restaurants but from every guest room, every bathroom. The ocean is not a view to be framed and offered as a reward. It is a constant, shifting with weather and tide and the particular mood of an afternoon, becoming part of the ordinary texture of a stay rather than its punctuation.
Odisha carries one of the subcontinent’s richest material traditions. Its stone carvers, metalworkers, weavers, and woodworkers have accumulated centuries of knowledge that today exists at a genuinely fragile edge, under pressure from the economics of the contemporary and the appetite for the fast. HBA made a considered choice: to engage these communities not as suppliers of decorative motifs but as collaborators in an architectural language. Craft here is structural and ambient, woven into plaster and surface and threshold in ways that do not announce themselves but gradually reveal themselves. Floors are cast in situ from recycled marble waste. Walls are worked in plaster and paint with a diversity of technique that produces texture and depth without a sense of accumulation or weight. Locally quarried stone forms the base of the architecture, grounding the project in the very land it sits on.
Colour is drawn from Odisha itself, from the ochres and terracottas and quieter tones of its landscape and textile traditions, applied with the kind of restraint that allows a space to breathe rather than to perform. The result is an environment that shifts as you move through it: in scale, in quality of light, in the way air behaves differently in each volume. Intimacy and openness coexist without contradiction.
What HBA has produced at Taj Puri is ultimately an argument about where value comes from in hospitality design. Not from the imported or the imposed, but from the knowledge that was already here, in the hands of Odisha’s craftspeople, waiting to be taken seriously.
