Poseidon Undersea Resorts: 2006-2007

During the S201 build at MSubs, I was asked by Bruce Jones of US Submarines to design an underwater hotel using as much acrylic as possible. I contacted my old friends at JFD to see if they could help as I was already overloaded with subs for the US Navy. They despatched a very young John Ramsay to Plymouth from Glasgow. The two of us worked away to produce probably the first ever underwater hotel design, consisting of a steel backbone corridor, with 11 individual rooms down each side. Watertight doors enabled the rooms to be submerged individually and fixed onto the backbone that had been previously anchored to the sea bed. Should a room need repair, it could be detached and taken into dry dock.

At each end of the corridor was a large circular room with double curve acrylic windows all the way round. The view would have been quite stunning. The need to thermally form a large quantity of acrylic started the conversation between Bruce and Evonic which, together with Heinz Fritz, has now become a vital component of Triton Submarines today.

One of these rooms was laid out as a restaurant with the last in the row of 11 rooms being the kitchen. The other was a sub-divided relaxation area including a library, a lounge and, of course, a bar.

The resort was planned to go to the Fijian island of Katafanga. This is a small island in a bright turquois sea, complete with a lagoon in which the hotel would be placed. The combined resort would have extensive shore facilities so that many visitors can experience the underwater section.

However. the Fijian constitutional crisis of 2009, following a military coup in 2006, placed the project on indefinite hold. 

Since then, underwater hotels abound all over the world and we have recently been involved with a few high-profile projects, all bound up with NDAs, so not a topic of discussion here.