There’s a particular built language that has come to dominate Mexican beach houses: geometric volumes with sprawling terraces shaded by thatched palapas. It’s a graceful, sensible adaptation for the country’s rugged coastline, and one that I am personally fond of. The Hacienda Los Milagros—a sprawling mansion built in the 1990s in the beach town of Punta Mina, up the coast from the city of Puerto Vallarta— had nothing to do with that style at all. Were it not for the crashing waves just outside, the building, with its stucco walls and heavy wooden ceiling beams, might seem more at home among the highlands of the Bajío in central Mexico, a region characterized by its colonial towns, ornate churches, and cattle ranches. ↩ Our clients purchased this property from its original owners, the Texan philanthropist Anne Marion and her husband John, former chairman of Sotheby’s. By the time they brought us on they’d already opened up the windows and doors to let in the spectacular Pacific light, pared down the original project’s ornamental detailing, and streamlined its interior distribution. This allowed us to spend our first meeting focused not on the nuts and bolts of how they needed the house to work, but rather on dreaming up a story to guide our heavily collaborative design process. We decided that day that the house should feel like the property of a studio-era Hollywood director who’d fallen passionately in love with Mexico. It was a complete fantasy, of course—some houses demand a bit of whimsy—but it also framed the strong central value that shaped the project. We planned to source everything we could in Mexico. ↩ Too many people today seek out a neutered, homogenized, globalized beige aesthetic, a bland “good taste” designed to please everyone. It’s usually achieved through design choices that evoke absolutely no emotion whatsoever. I stand firmly against the notion of “good taste” because those with “bad taste,” as far as
I’m concerned, share a lack of interest, lack of curiosity, and an all-encompassing obsession with personal comfort and/or what other people think. I do, however, believe strongly in celebrating local taste, and few places speak to me more powerfully than Mexico’s Pacific coast. For years, my grandparents would spend a few weeks each year playing cards, eating seafood, and visiting friends in Puerto Vallarta. I couldn’t have been much older than twelve when, on one of my annual visits, I started my first collection of crafts and folk art, picked up at the tourist markets in Vallarta’s old town. Even then I believed in the value of real things made by real people, the imperfections that come from the intervention of human hands over the manufactured perfection of mass-produced luxury goods. We all agreed that this house, for all its opulence and excess, should capture the same transporting power that those objects had for me in my childhood, a goal we would accomplish by showcasing contemporary Mexican art, craft, and design.
The Hacienda was an ideal canvas. We commissioned an elaborate ceramic tile mosaic from the artisan Ángel Santos—formed, dried, painted, and fired over the course of months in Santos’s studio in Tonalá, it depicted a pastoral landscape in keeping with the house’s fantastical intent. The Mexico City-based designers Pedro y Juana produced laser-cut lamps from multicolored metal and hanging planters in a powdery, mineral pink for over the bar. We asked Marcela Calderón, whose ceramic studio Taller 36 draws on her family’s long history in the craft town of Patamban, to make a series of ceramic platters that depict creatures from the ocean. We worked with painter Ana Segovia, a rising star in Mexico City’s art scene, to produce a series of portraits of bullfighters. This spirit of making and turning to craftspeople to add depth carries through the entire project. I like to imagine that, when the owners paddle back from a world-class break just beyond their property line—they’re avid surfers— they return to their home with a special sense of pride in knowing exactly where they are.
