West Beach Hotel
Kiawah Island, South Carolina
West Beach Village, intended to serve as the town center for the Kiawah Island resort community, combines Low Country vernacular with more formal architectural traditions. To support the conference center, visitor center, and Cougar Point Golf Clubhouse also designed under Gary Brewer’s leadership, a master plan was developed that included concepts for a new 150-key hotel to occupy one of the last waterfront sites on the island. Approached from the golf clubhouse along a prominent live-oak allée, the hotel presents a central mass inspired by columned antebellum mansions, accommodating reception, meeting spaces, dining, and shops. Guest suites with ground-level and upper-level porches are organized in pavilions that break down the scale of the hotel, defining a series of garden courts. A boardwalk runs along the beach, anchored at one end by a pool club and at the other by a restaurant pavilion with fine dining below and a more casual oyster bar above. Surface parking is sensitively sited east and west of the allée.
Gary Brewer, Project Partner and Designer
Robert A.M. Stern Architects
Renderings: Jeff Stikeman, Michael McCann