Hempel’s arrival in Bahia seems right for her. It’s a place favoured by chic, well-to-do bohos, which, to some extent, describes the New Zealand-born designer, who delivers luxury in a clean, Zen-like guise — pure and unostentatious.

Warapuru looks as if it will embody that stripped-down approach more strongly than any of her previous hotels. Wallpaper magazine has already described it as a “Bond lair”; my initial impression was of the strange, futuristic work of Le Corbusier — but Hempel swiftly puts me right. “It has nothing to do with that look,” she says icily. Still, it’s hard to describe — a minimalist, linear design that combines 20th-century Modernism with something altogether more weird: part Mayan palace, part — well, yes — Bond-villain fantasy.

Warapuru will be a top-end hotel with private villas attached, each with its own pool, which will be for sale but run and managed by the hotel. It is backed by João Vaz Guedes, a Portuguese hotelier, whom Hempel describes as a man with “great vision”. He has given her complete creative and managerial control of the project, from the architecture and interiors through to the food and spa products (the latter will be her own). Hempel appears to have learnt a few hard lessons from the sale of Blakes in 2004, which she bought back this year, apparently eager to reimpose her authority on it. “I will never, ever take on any project where I don’t have a sustainable design and management contract. I have to be in control,” she says firmly.

Details on Warapuru are still sketchy. The hotel is not built yet, and Hempel is “completely in the middle of the creative process”, which is why she could not give me exact room rates (“could be £500 a night, it depends . . .”), the overall budget (“that keeps changing”), or its capacity, but she gave a ballpark figure of 150 hotel rooms and 40 to 60 villas. The villas will cost anything between £500,000 and £1.5 million, she says, but they will be managed by the hotel, and owners can lease them back when they are not there.

Warapuru is stepped into the hillside and its vegetation, giving it, on paper, a look of something emerging from this wild, exotic landscape. There’s a conspicuous absence of doors. Instead there are long, vertical, recessed openings that could be corridors, or windows, or light shafts. Hempel seems to want to play on this ambiguity, so that you will surrender yourself to the abstract nature of the building, leaving your old life and habits — such as walking through rectangular doorways — behind. Hempel says the experience will be “like entering a citadel — you will walk between crevices and cracks, you will hardly ever see a door.

“The scale of it is extraordinary. It will be long, strange and strong, it will be homogeneous with the landscape, with the outside coming inside. It can be a retreat, or somewhere where you have innovative beauty treatments, go powersailing, climb banana trees, have picnics, or learn any sort of Brazilian dance you want.”

And will the project be ecologically sound? “If I can make it that way, then yes.” But when pressed, Hempel says that green principles are, in truth, not much of a concern for her guests, even though they may profess to care about them.

In the usual pattern of hotel openings, Warapuru’s launch date keeps shunting forward. Completion is now scheduled for 2007. To get there, you will fly to Salvador and then travel by car for about 90 minutes, although Hempel hopes to put a landing strip into the complex within a few years of its opening. It seems to mark a new, adventurous chapter in her design career, which has been quiet for a few years now.

And if Warapuru looks strange, her next project sounds downright subversive: a “totally anti-Vegas” hotel in Las Vegas, right on the Strip. “It’s a monastery,” she says, without a trace of irony.

www.warapuru.com.