Description

Forest village Bergeijk represents the new holiday park with a warm, inviting, innovative atmosphere designed on the old camping site in Zwarte Bergen, which is located just outside of the village of Luijksgestel, part of the municipality of Bergeijk. The actual state of the existing camping was in poor condition and didn’t satisfy the demands of the recreation market.

In the proposed masterplan all the houses have a circular organization around a central square where the facility building is located. They merge gradually with the surrounding landscape, creating this way a unique layout that looks like a mandala or a dream catcher which enhances the dreamy feeling of a labyrinth where people have the freedom to wander around or even get lost in it. In our proposed urban plan, we create two circulation roads in the shape of rings around the central square, that allow the cars to enter the park and in the radius of each ring we place some bending sand paths that make it easier for the pedestrians to reach the holiday houses. The three main landscape elements of the area (the forest, the sand and the water) are also integrated in our plan through these leaf-shaped open areas in between the curvy sand paths that serve not only as a connecting point to the surrounding nature but also as a meeting area for the visitors of the park. In our urban concept, through the open areas and curved sand paths, we divide the plan into 9 branches and for each branch the lodges follow the same direction from the central square and they are also arranged in a way that their main characteristic facade is always oriented to the center and to the forest. For each branch we rotate the direction of the lodges with an angle of 30 degrees. The two volumes of the houses are positioned in a ‘bayonet’ shift in relation to each other creating the possibility to always have one of the private outside spaces facing the sun.

From the functionality perspective, we follow the concentric circles concept in which we group the lodges in relation to their typology, for example in the first circle closer to the center, we place the lodges of 4 and 6 people, for families with children and outside the center we mainly place the luxury and extra luxury lodges and also some groups of tiny houses to be able to have more that holistic feeling of ‘living in nature’. Our main goal was to create a blended masterplan with an organic structure that connects in a harmonic way the houses with the natural surroundings of the landscape, and evokes a feeling of mindfulness, balance, peace and freedom.