So what are we planning to build, exactly? Here’s a “before” picture showing what we’ve got to work with. Our fig orchard is that area with the trees up on the hill, and the courtyard with buildings on the left is the farmhouse where we’ll live while we work on the project. Towards the back of the picture you can see a cutting where the road goes up to a nearby lake and on into the mountains.
Plan showing the farmhouse and orchard as they are now.
We want to build a six-room hotel, with the rooms grouped into three pairs. Each building will be a generously proportioned bungalow, and each room will have its own secluded verandah. We also need a swimming pool (of course!) and a kitchen with a terrace for serving breakfast, etc. Here’s our current plan for how it will all be laid out. That’s the kitchen and terrace at the bottom centre of the picture, and you can see a couple of pergolas giving shade for the garden. There’s also a low wall that runs along our southern boundary. Most of the verandahs will look out across the pool and to the south. Plenty of room on the roofs for solar panels, too.
Plan showing how the different buildings will be laid out on the orchard block
These pictures were done in Sketchup 2013. It’s a great free-to-use 3D design program and we totally recommend it if you’re building anything from a bookshelf to a house.
With that landscape you could probably do some interesting “keyline” water management design ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyline_design )
PS: Ignore this if the previously posted comment went through :-(
Definitely. I hadn’t seen it called “keyline” water management before but that looks very helpful. Certainly job number one for us is going to be some swales on contour, and maybe a bit of hugelkultur.