The Igman Retreat
A substantial main lodge as the centrepiece — reception, restaurant and common rooms under one large timber roof — with around twenty individual guest huts scattered naturally through the trees, sited between the standing spruce rather than in cleared rows. Add a swimming pool and a tennis court and this becomes a boutique nature resort rather than a private house. It is the same low-impact, tree-preserving approach as the Eco-Lodge, at genuine hospitality scale. And the geography carries it: guests can ski Bjelašnica in ten minutes and Jahorina in an hour, raft the Neretva at Konjic before lunch, and reach Mostar, Neum or Dubrovnik inside a day. At 3.512 hectares there is room for all of it and still forest between every hut. A small wellness area — sauna and jacuzzi — sits alongside the pool as the resort’s central gathering space. The cottages themselves would be modern, efficiently prefabricated cabins, which keeps the work on site short and the disturbance to the trees around them small. As for how a layout like this would sit on the terrain: the parcel divides naturally into three zones. A forested zone is left as it is — standing timber and nothing built. A central zone, on the gentler ground, carries the main lodge, the restaurant, the pool and the wellness area. And a panoramic zone along the higher edges holds the guest cottages, each turned toward the view rather than toward its neighbour.