This is a study for placing housing on a steep mountainside site in the Caribbean. The site is currently accessible only by goat trails. A small hotel plans to build along the bay leading out to the tip of this peninsula and we studied how land beyond the hotel might be used for additional housing sites. We chose about a dozen and a half buildable sites and studied alternative ways of providing a limited number of larger sites, or a greater number of smaller sites. The base study has seventeen sites.
The grades vary from twenty five percent slopes to slopes over sixty percent. The houses are generally sited on slopes of thirty five percent or less in order to limit what would already be extraordinary foundation costs. The sites are pulled back from the water’s edge so that the shoreline can be a continuous common area. There are clusters of small houses that can be recombined for larger houses. The clusters provide, at any given density, larger areas of open landscape than would be had with an even dispersal of the program, and the mix of single, double and triple sites provides variety along the length of the road. A number of sites straddle one of two spines where the contours form right angles. Along these spines, “L” shaped plans afford panoramic views north out to the open ocean, west to the adjacent bay, and south back across the island. Most lots look either east or west along a string of mountains on the island’s north coast, culminating at the dormant volcano on the wet tropical end of the island.
Trade winds provide constant air movement, but a tough environment for plants. Most houses would be afforded small protected gardens or courtyards out of the wind. The road was laid out to balance considerations of slope and linear foot costs, each house requiring roughly a hundred additional linear feet of relatively expensive road. The houses are sited to facilitate turns in the road, sometimes providing them with retaining walls on the high side. Houses are also cut into the hillside on the high side in order to minimize foundation walls on the low side, and to minimize their impact on the views of upslope houses.