Celebrity Getaways in Mexico: Privacy, Not a Guest List

A house that works for somebody who does not want to be seen looks, from the road, like nothing at all. A wall, a gate, a number, and planting high enough that the roofline does not show. You could drive past it four times.

That is the whole subject of this page, and it is why the page is not going to give you a list of names.

What we are not going to tell you

The internet is full of pages claiming to know which villa in Mexico which famous person stayed in. Some of them are ours, historically, and we are taking that back.

No listing in our collection names a guest. Not a famous one, not any one. Nobody here confirms who has stayed where, to a journalist or to the next enquiry, and the arrangement is not a courtesy — it is the product. A rental company that advertises its guest list has told you exactly what it would say about you.

So what follows is the useful version of the question: where in Mexico can you actually disappear for a week, and what does a house need to have for that to be true?

What privacy is, in a list

You can check all of this on a listing before you book, which is the point of putting it in writing.

A gated community with its own security. Not a guard at a hotel desk — a controlled road, with a gate you pass through before you reach your own gate. Casa Peregrina at Sierra del Mar states it plainly: a secure, 24/7 gated community, with a chef cooking three meals a day inside it.

A wall and a gate of your own. The second gate is the one that matters, because the first one admits delivery drivers and gardeners for every house inside it.

An inner courtyard rather than a street-facing terrace. Hacienda de Los Santos above Conchas Chinas is built around one: the life of the house happens in the middle of it, with a gated community outside and 24-hour security on that, and a full staff from nine until seven.

A chef, so the group never has to be seen. This is the one people underestimate. Nine nights in restaurants is nine opportunities to be photographed; nine dinners at your own table is none. In Puerto Vallarta 49 of our 54 houses include the chef in the rate, and in Punta Mita 75 of 128, which is why both coasts come up in this conversation so often. The chef in the rate does more for a private week than any other single line on a quote.

What does not make a house private: size, a famous architect, or a price. A very large house with a public beach in front of it is a very large house on a public beach.

Punta Mita: a gate, and then another gate

If the brief is nobody sees us for seven days, this is the easiest answer in Mexico, and it is a matter of geography rather than glamour. The peninsula is a gated resort community with a private road system, so the outer gate is a real one, and the houses inside sit behind their own.

Villa Punta Pacifico Estate is the largest we place guests in there — seventeen bedrooms, thirty-eight people, the chef in the rate — and its own listing describes it as one of the few addresses on the peninsula able to hold a group that size at all. For a family that travels with other people attached to it, that single-property arithmetic is the whole decision.

Casa Koko is the other shape: nine bedrooms, twenty people, a house manager and concierge ten hours a day, butler service, and a kitchen staffed by a chef, a sous-chef and an assistant from nine until nine. Its listing also carries the line that tells you most about the peninsula — social events are allowed only for the number of people staying in the house, and the resort's noise policy applies. That is a rule written for residents, and it is why nothing here ever becomes a scene.

Puerto Vallarta: the only place with a history

Vallarta is where this story actually comes from, and the history is sourced rather than rumoured.

In 1963 John Huston shot The Night of the Iguana at Mismaloya, then a village of about three hundred people reachable only by boat. Richard Burton came to make it. Elizabeth Taylor came with him. El Universal records that the two of them moved into a house in Gringo Gulch — the old hillside quarter above the Río Cuale that kept its red tile roofs and adobe fronts — having arrived fleeing the paparazzi and the fame.

And then the detail that is the best argument on this page. El Informador reports that Burton bought the house for Taylor's thirty-second birthday and that a pink bridge was thrown across the street to the house opposite, so that the two of them would not have to walk out among the photographers. Sixty years later people still build their way around the same problem; they just do it with planting and a longer drive. The bridge is still there, and the house is a hotel now.

Where celebrities stay in Puerto Vallarta goes through the four neighbourhoods properly.

Los Cabos: a cliff, and a road that ends

Cabo's version of privacy is topographic. The Pedregal sits on the hillside above Cabo San Lucas on roads that go nowhere else, and the houses look out over the Pacific from a height that nothing can approach from.

Casa Piedra Pedregal is the type: terraces stepping down the rock with an infinity pool that reads as continuous with the ocean below it, and no neighbour at eye level.

The honest caveat about Cabo, which we give everybody: not one of our thirty-nine houses there is beachfront. On that coast the houses sit above the water rather than on it, and only four of the thirty-nine include the chef in the rate. Privacy here is a view and a gate; it is not a stretch of sand outside the kitchen.

The Riviera Maya: distance instead of walls

And the fourth answer is the simplest. North of Tulum, on Soliman Bay and Tankah Bay, there is no gate because there is nothing to gate — just a bay off the main road with a handful of houses on it and almost no through traffic. Twenty minutes to the town when you want it, and complete indifference the rest of the week.

It is the least theatrical privacy of the four, and the easiest to live in.

Which one is yours

If the group is large, Punta Mita or Puerto Vallarta, because that is where the staffed houses that fit are — houses for large groups goes through every one of them. If it is small and the point is the view, the Pedregal. If it is a family and the point is water, the Caribbean bays.

Start with our fully staffed houses, and tell Rocío what you actually need the week to be. She will not ask you who you are.