Eco Mantra

Most developers we work with already believe in sustainability. It just has to stand up financially.

So every recommendation we make comes with the math attached. What it costs to install. What it costs to run. What comes back in savings. How many years until it pays for itself. We call it the costing study.

It runs on the project’s own conditions. Its groundwater, its sun exposure, its vendor pool. Not benchmarks borrowed from somewhere else. What works in Uluwatu may not work in Ubud.

Not every feature pays back on its own, and we say so openly. Some earn their place by covering the cost of another. Some through environmental value worth it on its own terms. What matters is that the project holds together as one design, and that whoever signs off can defend every line.
A development shouldn’t have to choose between sustainability and profit.

Swipe through for how the costing study works. Working on a development in the tropics? DM us to see how the analysis reads on your project.

The most common review a well-designed regenerative property gets isn't just about the solar panels or the certification.

It's some version of: "I don't know why, but it just felt right."

Guests rarely have the language for what they're responding to. But they feel the difference between a room that was oriented well and one that wasn't. Between a site that still sounds like itself and one that doesn't.

That gap — between what guests can name and what they actually experience — is where the real design brief lives.

Most properties try to close it with storytelling. The ones that actually close it do it with decisions made before the structure goes up.

Quote attribution Tara Schwenk, Senior Director of Digital Strategy, Lemongrass Marketing — from It's a Journey – a sustainable travel podcast, Lemongrass Insight Trend Report episode. Quote lightly edited for length and readability; substance preserved.

 

What would change if the place came first — before the program, before the brief, before the budget conversation? 

Most development decisions start with the market. Occupancy targets, competitive set, what’s working in the region. Those are real constraints. But the properties that endure — the ones guests return to, talk about, and choose over newer options — tend to have something the market analysis didn’t produce. A relationship with where they stand. 

Regenerative design isn’t a certification or a sustainability chapter at the back of the report. It’s a way of sequencing decisions so that the land, water, community, and ecology around a property are treated as the foundation — not the footnote. 

The result is a property that performs differently. More resilient to disruption. Harder to replicate. More connected to the kind of travel that’s growing fastest right now. 

This carousel is about that shift — in how development decisions get made, and what becomes possible when the place comes first.