New York hospitality company Habitas has completed the first element of a 3D-printed hotel in Mexico.
The development in Todos Santos on 10ha of Baja California beachfront consists of 80 rooms in a number of detached chalets, swimming pool, restaurant, spa and herb garden, and its building schedule is four months.
The company prints elements of the chalets, and fits them together on site. It said this method lowers the carbon cost of its projects and does not make permanent changes to a landscape.
Oliver Ripley, chief executive and co-founder of Habitas, told Forbes magazine: “We basically ended up building our own factory on the east coast of Mexico. We are using modular 3D printing for the structures, putting them in containers, shipping them and building on site like Lego. So, our build-out will be less than four months.”
Habitas was founded in 2013 with the aim of supplying holidays to millennial tourists with an interest in ecology.
Ripley explained: “The hotels are targeted at millennial tourists looking for a social holiday rather than a fancy lobby.”
So far it has built two more conventional hotels, one in Tulum, on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, and another in Namibia, Africa.
The Namibian hotel uses Tesla solar batteries to pump 30,000 litres of water a day, and has recycling systems for water and waste.
Habitas has reportedly raised $20m for future ventures. Over the next two years it plans to print hotels at four more Mexican sites, another in Costa Rica and several in Bhutan and Aman, Jordan.
Image: A completed chalet in Todos Santos (Habitas)
