Luxury Resort Rope Bridge

The first thing you notice on Félicité is the granite. Huge, rounded, prehistoric - boulders the size of small houses, stacked the way only deep time arranges things. Studio RHE's architects in London had spent eight years working with that landscape for Six Senses Zil Pasyon. They came to us with a particular problem. The spa, set deep amongst the rocks, needed an entrance. They didn't want a path. They wanted an arrival.

A rope bridge sounds simple until you try to anchor one into solid granite on a tropical island, three flights and a shipping container away from your workshop. You can't pour conventional foundations. You can't disturb what makes the place extraordinary in the first place. We designed cast concrete plinths at each end, with steel rods embedded into the granite itself, and from those plinths ran structural steel cable lines end-to-end with swivel load rings. The deck floats on those cables. Every component was prefabricated at our workshop in the Surrey Hills, then shipped - one pallet, one container, one carefully thought-through wish-list of parts.

Three of us flew out. We worked alongside the resort's own team under the structural engineer's certification, and the bridge was up in three days. Marine-grade stainless throughout, because of the salt. Hand-weaved poly-hemp balustrades. The deck is reclaimed hardwood with full provenance - timber that already had a life before this one, and a colour you cannot manufacture.

Tom Foster at Studio RHE wrote afterwards that the result looks fantastic. What I remember more is something a guest said on the platform - that the walk across had quietened them before they'd even reached the door. Which is, I think, what an entrance is really for.