Ixtapa House

View of the semi-open living room in the villa

Project Details

• Project Name: Ixtapa House
• Program: Family villa by the beach
• Location of site: Punta Ixtapa, Ixtapa Zihuatanejo Mexico
• Design Team: Fernando Romero, Mark Seligson, Juan Pablo Maza, Ernesto Gadea, Ivan Arellano, Martin Palardy, Aaron Hernandez, Enrique Giner de los Rios, Gonzalo Elizarraras, Victor Jaime, Maria Carrillo, David Tellez, Rodrigo Ramos, Mario Najera.
• Date of completion of project: 2001

View of the villa with its entrance guiding sight to the ocean that lies beyond it

The Building

The house is built on a private beach on the Pacific Ocean coastline and was designed to celebrate its extraordinary site. The traditional Mexican beach-house is constructed with a number of wooden columns that carry a high palapa roof. This allows the sea breeze to pass through the palapa and ventilate the space in this hot and humid climate.

View of the living room from within the villa overlooking the ocean

The design brief proposed a number of challenges of which the response to the ocean was most critical. Further, keeping the site in mind, the client required a high degree of privacy to be clearly established around the living space which he envisaged as a communal area to receive a high number of guests, and which was intimate and protected at the same time. The client also wished for the 9-bedroom villa to be modest in its vocabulary.

The swimming pool in the house is completely open to the ocean

The design adopts the vernacular typology and the living-area is thus a semi-open space shaded by the roof. However, since the client wanted a more closed and intimate space, the columns were replaced by two organic volumes that close off direct views from the inland.

View of the dining area in the semi-open living space

The house is located as near to the ocean as permitted by local regulations; this created an interior back-door garden cut away from the coastline for the children to play in.

View of the interiors of the bathroom in the villa

The house is accessed by a narrow entrance between these two supporting volumes. There thus emerges a continuity between the living room and the swimming pool; a space completely open to the sea view. Here the classical structural tripartite floor-wall-ceiling is dissolved into one single gesture that embraces space. The unique landscape became an abstract image in the every-day life of the household.

Credits

• Text: Courtesy of the architect
• Photographs: Courtesy of the architect
• Compiled and edited by Varun M. Ajani