The design and architecture magazine Dezeen has included two hotels in the Coast Region on its list of the world’s top-10 hotel designs of 2022.
First on the list is Casa TO, a two-story, nine-room, 600-square-meter boutique hotel in La Punta Zicatela, where Mexico City-based architect Ludwig Godefroy gave natural cooling top priority.
Gardens on the ground floor rooms and terraces and outdoor baths on those above were included as means to deal with high temperatures.
Godefroy described the hotel as “like the reinterpretation of a Oaxacan temple, generating a radical sensory experience upon entering.”
With walls, floors and ceilings made of cast-in-place concrete, Casa TO strikes visitors with a cavernous quality, heightened by various openings and circular cutaways, allowing the fresh breeze to flow through.
Exposed concrete is softened by custom furniture and furnishings designed and built by expert craftspeople from Puebla, Guadalajara and Oaxaca, which the hotel said can be purchased by guests under a fair trade model.
“Godefroy interweaves aesthetics and functionality, emphasizing the honesty of the textures of the raw materials, such as concrete, steel, clay and wood,” said the hotel.
The second Puerto property to make the list was Hotel Terrestre, which features a series of 14 villas oriented in a linear fashion parallel to the beach.
Located some 30 km west of Puerto Escondido in San Isidro Llano Grande, the hotel was designed and built by Taller de Arquitectura X (TAX) to have a minimal impact on the site’s ecology.
Given Terrestre’s “remote location . . . the studio decided to create an energy program that relies solely on solar panels.”
The structure itself was built with concrete and white mud bricks made by hand in the state of Puebla, with wooden finishes and touches crafted from locally sourced Maquil wood.
Each of the villas has its own garden, outdoor shower, rooftop and swimming pool, maximizing guests’ views of the Pacific Ocean and of the Sierra Sur de Oaxaca mountain range.
“The buildings are embedded in the landscape as if they have been there for hundreds of years,” said TAX. “A certain notion of antiquity, but also of futurism, characterizes the architecture.”
Dezeen featured over 50 hotel and short-stay projects in 2022, highlighting key hospitality trends that include growing demand for staycations and the rise of the work retreat.
Hotel Flavia, in Oaxaca city, was the third and last Mexican property to make Dezeen’s Top Ten Hotels of 2022.
With reports by Dezeen
