Nearly every resort has a pasta station at its dinner buffet, but none so homemade as the Italian-rooted Cocoon who not only prepares the pasta sauces fresh in front of you, but also the pasta noodles themselves.
Best of the Maldives: Lighting Installation – Cocoon
Cocoon’s distinctive “design resort” has filled its island with its own tree centrepieces with more contemporary aesthetic in its innovative new artistic lighting installation.
- “The resort has been furnished in a tasteful contemporary Italian style by leading design company, Lago. The project is inspired by Tomaso Schiaffino, Art Director of Bellaria Design, an individual who focuses on innovation and unique design. ‘Tree of Light’ is made up of real lighting installations that took 2 years to design due to its sophistication. Each model requires 85 custom parts and the lastest-gen LEDs.”
Best of the Maldives: Talking Furniture – Cocoon
More of a spoken word rendition is a feature of Cocoon’s rooms. “Talking Furniture” in particular. Each of the Lago designed pieces comes with a smart tag for takemehome.cocoonmaldives.com :
- “An experience out of the ordinary is what LAGO has transformed here at Cocoon Maldives, notwithstanding the unique design and the LAGO TALKING FURNITURE project that powers interaction with the furniture. Connecting to each guests’ Smartphone device through a wired chip in the furniture, to activate a direct interaction with the resort, to learn about themed evenings or indeed to share images and reviews of the experience.”
Best of the Maldives: Fitness Tree – Cocoon
Cocoon not only brought the inside…out, but it also made its outdoor workout facility more like the outdoors itself. Its “Tree of Well Being” is not just a functional fitness apparatus for body-weight training, but also provides a striking sculptural aesthetic as well
- ·The Tree of Wellbeing is provided by MyEquilibria, a ground-breaking new concept of physical fitness based on instinctive body movements. At first glance, Tree of Wellbeing looks more like a work of art than a place for exercise. Engineered around the biomechanics of instinctive training, the Tree of Wellbeing was created by innovative designer Vito Di Bari.”
See the video below for a video demonstration of one of the exercises.
This is just the latest of a number of activities brought outdoors in the sun-soaked landscape so I’ve now added a new tag “Al Fresco” for things conventionally done indoors that resorts have taken outdoors.
Best of the Maldives: Water Treading Pool – Cocoon
Happy New Year 2019! Lots of New Years Resolutions. Including renewed resolve to work off the holiday goodies of the New Years Celebrations. Best to start off easy. Like a simple stroll. Or maybe a stroll with a bit of resistance…like wading through water. Cocoon’s Cube Spa has introduced a wading pool, aka “Kneipp Pool” (thanks Paola). It might seem like a pool of water for wading in the Maldives is a bit like bringing coals to Newcastle, but in fairness, the pool offers a number of advantages over the beach stroll. For example, it is completely level and does not have sharp pieces of coral to accidentally step on.
Best of the Maldives: Glass Sink – Cocoon
The bathrooms in Cocoon come with a different type of view. The design is really enchanting and in a way is its own variation of “floating furniture” with the water seeming to hover over the floor below.
Best of the Maldives: Maldivian Kids Club – Cocoon
Maldives National Day today. And youngsters visiting Cocoon can regale themselves in indigenous vibe as their Pupa kids club is built entirely to look like a traditional Maldivian village.
Best of the Maldives: Swinging – Cocoon
Even its distinctive floating furniture add to the dangling design vibe of the resort. Lots of resorts have swings, but Cocoon has them in places I’ve never seen before like the reception (see above, great for soothing the sadness of saying goodbye when waiting for your return transfer), and the bathroom (see below, not sure what this is great for…maybe to help get things moving??).
Best of the Maldives: Shadow Trompe L’oeil – Cocoon
QI of the Day: “Why do fish have stripes and spots?”
“To confuse and scare predators”
Buzzzzz!
Actually, recent research by Kelly et al provides a range of counter evidence that the leading theories, ie. “Predator defence by mimicking predators’ enemies’ eyes, deflecting attacks or intimidating predators…Striped body patterns have been suggested to serve for both social communication and predator defence.”). These hypothesis are contradicted by a range of data and observations. For example, “Contrary to our expectations, spots and eyespots appeared relatively recently in butterflyfish evolution and are highly evolutionarily labile, suggesting that they are unlikely to have played an important part in the evolutionary history of the group.”
And why does the Cocoon resort have a trompe l’oeil shadow on the wall of a wrought iron grille as if the sun was shining through some window on the Riviera? Just for a bit of aesthetic whimsy (maybe that is an explanation for reef fish too). Even more mysterious is how the shadow is created as there is absolutely nothing on the villa windows except what appears to be clear glass. It’s a bit more design wizardry from the resort…floating furniture, shadows of invisible things – it’s like staying a Hogwarts. Magic all over the resort from the reef to the rooms.
Best of the Maldives: Steak and Egg Station – Cocoon
The main rival to eggs benedict for breakfast luxury is steak and eggs. More of an American staple, you don’t find it that often on European menus. So I was delighted to find Cocoon’s Steak and Egg Station at their breakfast buffer. Quite nice cuts of beef grilled to your liking along with your choice of egg accompaniment (I tend to prefer scrambled with my steak and a bit of ketchup, which they also had at hand).
