There are two distinctively different forms of accommodation available at Coral Cove Resort – rooms on land and rooms attached to the jetty, also known as the sea village.
Table 4-2 summarises the accommodation available in terms of potential occupancy rate. The island resort is capable of hosting from 8 – 110 guests at any one time. One of the suites is set aside for the management, and one of the jetty rooms is used as a massage room. Whilst the potential is there for the resort to host up to 110 guests, this does not usually take place and the resort typically welcomes between 20 – 50 guests over one weekend. The larger guest potential is aimed at catering for school groups or for private corporate group functions (per. comm., Ng, 08/09/06). During the weekdays, the resort is open for bookings if there is a minimum of eight guests.
Table 4-2: Rooms & Occupancy Potential of Coral Cove Resort
Room Type Unit Occupancy Potential
Land Rooms
Beach Room (with air-con) 8 rooms 2 – 6 pax per room Sea Village
Jetty Rooms A (with air-con) 7 rooms 2 – 4 pax per room Jetty Rooms B (with fan) 4 rooms 2 – 4 pax per room
Lodge A (with air-con) 1 room Up to 6 pax
Lodge B (with fan) 1 room Up to 8 pax
Suite (with air-con) 2 rooms 2 – 4 pax per room
Longhouse (with fan) 1 unit Up to 30 pax
Total Guest Potential Up to 110 pax (see Figure 4-2 for map of room location)
The Beach Rooms and Jetty Rooms A were the first to be constructed in 2004. The estimate investment cost of each room is around S$20,000 and includes manpower cost for construction, furniture, piping for the sewage disposal system, cabling for power and electricity, and expenses for construction supplies (per. comm., Ng, 14/07/06). These developments, along with the kitchen and the dinning area, the septic tanks and the digging of freshwater wells, plus the importation of furniture took around one and a half years to complete. The suite, lodges, Jetty Rooms B and the longhouse are additional constructions that were built in 2005/2006 to boost the resort’s accommodation capabilities. These rooms took a shorter time to complete as most of the basic infrastructure were already in place through the initial construction phase and as the management acquired experience in the procedure and expectation of the technical staff employed (per. comm., Teddy, 09/06/06). These additional rooms provide diversity in the available accommodation and offer guest rooms with varying degrees of amenities and facilities.
Jetty (320m)
Coastline
Beach Rooms (2 x 4 rooms)
N
Second Kelong
Sea
Longhouse Kitchen, Storage Room
& Common Dining Area
Jetty Rooms A (3 rooms)
Jetty Rooms A (4 rooms)
2 Suites (1 for Mr Ng)
Lodge A & B Jetty Rooms B
(4 rooms, 1 for massage)
First Kelong Partially submerged,
ắ of coral rocks exposed during Low Water Spring
Fully submerged coral rocks &
seagrass Dry, sand & sparse coral
rocks fully exposed during Low Water Neap & Low Water Spring
Low Water Neap Low Water Spring
Staff Quarters
Approx. 60m Approx. 90m
Land
Figure 4-2: Layout of Rooms (not drawn to scale)
The beach rooms were built on land, parallel to the coastline and face the southern coast (Plate 4-1 & 4-2). Construction for three stand-alone white chalet-like buildings, complete with furniture, electrical wiring and sewerage disposal systems, took place in early 2004 and took over a year to complete (per. comm., Ng, 14/07/06). Two of the buildings are used as guests’ rooms whilst the third building is utilised as staff quarters and as a storage facility to store additional furniture, snorkelling gear, scuba tanks and other items. Each building has four separate bedrooms and can be configured to accommodate between 2 – 6 guests per room, allowing for a maximum of 48 guests. Each bedroom has a private attached bathroom with shower and modern toilet facilities, air-conditioning and has either double or bunk beds that allow for up to six guests per room, or a single queen-size bed for twin sharing. Figure 4-3 shows a standard layout plan of the beach rooms. Furniture for the bedrooms, such as toilets, shower heads, water heater and beds were imported from both Singapore and Batam (per. comm., Ng, 14/07/06).
Plate 4-1: Overview of Beach Rooms on Land Facing South (the two buildings in the distance (Left) are for guests, whilst the building on the right (Foreground) is for staff and storage
(source: author’s photograph)
Plate 4-2: Beach Rooms, Photograph shows Single Building with Four Rooms - facing the sea/South (source: author’s photograph)
6m
Toilet
Bed
Door Dressing Table
Windows Window &
Air-con Unit
Not to Scale 4 ẵm
Figure 4-3: Layout Plan of Beach Room
The second type of accommodation available on the island are described as adhering to a ‘sea-village theme’ (Coral Cove Island Resort 2007b). These are rooms that are built on top of stilts that were driven into the seabed and extend out to the sea through a common jetty (Plate 4-3). There are four different grading amongst these rooms and provide a variety of sharing options for guests. The Suites have an additional attached living area for relaxation, whilst the Lodges share a common patio. The Jetty Rooms are the simplest rooms within the sea-village. All the rooms were designed to blend in with the island theme resort and are made of wood. According to Mr Ng, the earlier rooms were constructed using nibong wood, the same material that the jetty and the kelong are made out of, but subsequently teak wood was utilised for rooms that were constructed later as teak is considered hardier. Each room has a private patio, its own attached bathroom, with hot water for showering and modern flush toilets, plus air- conditioning in most of the rooms (Plate 4-4). The rooms measure 3.6m by 3.6m and excludes the toilets which are 1.2m by 2.4m. Dead coral shells were also harvested as decorative pieces to enhance the resort and rustic feel of the rooms (Plate 4-4). There are a total of 15 rooms plus one longhouse that are located along the length of the jetty.
Twenty-six Indonesian contractors who have experience in building wooden jetties and kelongs according to local Indonesia architecture were employed for the initial phase of construction (per. comm., Ng, 14/07/06). Wood was imported from Batam to construct these structures and the creation of wooden rooms blended in with the theme of a kelong, sea-village. This nature of building rooms made out of wood and over the sea is reminiscent of the local Indonesia architecture and can be found amongst other coastal villages in the Riau Archipelago such as in Bintan, Pulau
Petong and Pulau Galang (field observations, 25/11/06). One difference though is that the local layout of the Indonesian coastal villages tends to develop parallel along the coastline whilst at Pulau Segayang the jetty and rooms extends horizontally out to sea.
The use of indigenous materials and local craftsmanship adds to the appreciation of a resort’s setting (Ayala 1996) and for Pulau Segayang, connects the resort to a nostalgic past with reverence to tradition, and introduces guests to the traditional architecture of the region’s costal communities. These rooms attempt to recapture the traditional model of island living by way of its local architecture, whilst at the same time provide the conveniences of modernity by its modern facilities. The resort’s website claims that a visit to Pulau Segayang will allow guests to: “[d]iscover a disappearing way of life, and in the process re-discover yourself” (Coral Cove Island Resort 2007a). The marketing and architectural design have thus geared towards recreating an ‘island village’ (King 1997, p.183) that blurs the line between tradition and modernity by offering both at the same locality.
Plate 4-3: Jetty Rooms, over the coral reefs (source: author’s photograph)
Plate 4-4: Toilet Facilities with Decorative Coral Shells (source: author’s photograph)
To accommodate 120 students from CJC, an additional longhouse was built towards the end of 2006 (Plate 4-5 & 4-6). The longhouse was designed to make maximum use of space by providing bunk sleeping arrangements for up to 30 guests, with shared toilet and showering facilities, and to cater to future large groups of guests – with specific focus on schools organising overseas field trips (per. comm., Ng, 04/05/07).
The longhouse offers the most basic amenities amongst all the rooms in the resort and is one of the few rooms without air-conditioning. The management invested S$16,000 for the construction of the longhouse and views it at the most economical structure to be built in terms of recovering cost and profits in the future (per. comm., Ng, 04/05/07).
Plate 4-5: Construction of the Longhouse (source: author’s photograph)
Plate 4-6: Completed Longhouse (source: Mr H.T. Tan, December 2006)