Stick Together: Designing in Clusters

When people think about rural hospitality, they often think: space. Acres of it. Room to breathe, spread out, and build without boundaries. And while that’s a beautiful part of the draw, it’s often the developer’s urge to spread out across the whole site where most rural projects start to go off track.

Just because you have the land doesn’t mean you should scatter buildings across it. In fact, at HUTS, we often make the opposite case: design your hospitality project in a cluster—even when you have plenty of land to play with.

Why would we do that?

1. One System, Not Six

The fastest way to blow your budget in a rural build is to treat every unit like its own standalone house. Multiple wells. Multiple septic fields. Multiple power drops. Not only does that create financial and logistical headaches, it leaves you with a permanently inefficient operation.

Clustering units—especially when you think of them as a single system—lets you centralize infrastructure:

• One well
• One septic
• One transformer
• One driveway, one fire turnaround, one snow plow contract

That’s not just cheaper up front—it’s more resilient and easier to maintain long-term. It also makes permitting faster and more predictable in many jurisdictions, especially if the cluster is permitted as a single-family use or primary dwelling + accessory buildings.

2. The Intimacy of Experience

Good hospitality is never just about square footage. It’s about how it feels to be there. A well-designed cluster invites connection without forcing it. Guests can stumble on each other at the sauna, or walk quietly back to their cabin after dinner. You can design shared moments—coffee nooks, trailheads, fire circles—without losing the solitude people crave.

Think of it this way: clustering doesn’t remove privacy; it creates intentional privacy. And it supports the range of experiences that modern travelers want: alone time and proximity, calm and community.

3. Preservation Through Precision

Spreading buildings across a site chews up more land than most people realize: driveways, utility runs, tree clearing, erosion control. That natural landscape your guests came to enjoy? It’s paved over before you know it.

But when you cluster, you leave the rest of the land alone. Intact. Walkable. Beautiful. You preserve the forest, the meadow, the view. And that land, left wild, becomes part of the amenity stack—just without the cost to build it.

The best rural sites feel immersive and untouched. Clustered design lets you deliver that without faking it.

4. Easier to Phase. Easier to Grow.

Many of our clients don’t build everything at once. They start with a few units, get them booked, prove the model, and scale from there. A well-planned cluster makes that process clean and easy.

The shared systems are already there. You’re not extending power across a field or digging a new leach field for every phase. You just plug into the plan that was already built with growth in mind.

This approach reduces risk and opens the door to financing partners, since you can show a realistic path from MVP to Phase II without compounding the complexity.