A simple thatched bungalow on timber stilts over a Raiatea lagoon with a ladder into the water

Explained

The first overwater
bungalow.

Three Californians, a hotel on Raiatea with no beach, and a solution that became the most copied room in tropical tourism.

A stilted bungalow over a Raiatea lagoon

Hugh Kelley, Jay Carlisle and Donald McCallum came to French Polynesia from California in the early 1960s, bought a vanilla plantation on Moorea, and ended up in hotels. In the islands they were the Bali Hai boys, after the hotel they opened on Moorea in 1961.

01 · The problem

No beach.

Their second hotel, on Raiatea, sat on a shore with no sand: the main island of Raiatea has very little beach even today. Guests wanted to be in the water. In 1967 the partners built rooms on stilts over the lagoon with ladders down into it, so that the water came to the room instead. Thatched roofs, timber posts, a deck, a view of the reef.

The idea spread to their own hotels on Moorea and then to Bora Bora, where it found the lagoon it was made for, and then across the tropics. Half a century on, the overwater bungalow is the defining room of the Maldives, Fiji and a dozen other places, and in French Polynesia it runs from simple thatch on an atoll to glass-floored villas with pools on Bora Bora's motu.