Lazaret Hotel Complex

The Lazaret in Meljine, an 18th-century maritime quarantine and a cultural property of 10,482 m², was on the brink of being forgotten. Its stone walls were decaying and its cultural significance threatened by neglect. We reimagined it as the heritage hotel Lazure, a transformation that balances reverence for the past with the demands of contemporary life.

Built between 1728 and 1732 in the best manner of Venetian construction, the Lazaret was an imposing structure for its time. The Venetian authorities used the carved stone that monks had prepared for the church of nearby Savina Monastery, and water was brought from the monastery too. A fountain followed in 1741, and the chapel of St. Roch was built by the Austrians in 1830 and renewed in 1882. The quarantine only ceased operating in 1934. The complex then served the army in both Yugoslavias, the Belgrade combine PKB and, finally, as a holiday resort, and it entered the register of cultural properties in 2014. In the 1979 earthquake it suffered no significant damage, a true rarity for a building of its age and size beside the sea.

The complex stands at the end of the Pet Danica promenade, at the very start of Meljine, at the entrance to the Bay of Kotor yet sheltered from wind and sea. The Savina oak grove, the sea, the Nemila stream and the village bound it. A single entrance from the land leads through an elongated two-storey building to a sequence of piazzas, three of which, one main and two lateral, open toward the sea, with the other buildings gathered around them.

The conservation was surgical. The rhythmic stone façades were preserved with obsessive attention to detail and their historic rhythm reconstructed with precision, while contemporary elements were introduced that speak their own truth without drowning historical voices. The conserved Chapel of St. Rocco anchors the main courtyard.

The strategy turns a place of seclusion into a place of encounter. Openings, vantage points and fluid transitions soften the rigid typology of containment, so a complex built to keep people apart now invites them in. Heritage is not frozen in amber; it is a conversation across time.

Preserving the essence, reframing the experience and opening the plan up: each layer of intervention answers both historical rigor and contemporary adaptability. A luxury hotel and marina don't dilute this heritage, they give it a self-sustaining future, and adaptive reuse carries a far lighter carbon footprint than new construction.

Lazure holds its memory without being trapped by it: a landmark designed for the ongoing dialogue between a place's past and its future.

Scope: Conservation Project, Adaptive Reuse, Conservation Supervision