Mexican Villa Architecture: Hacienda, Colonial, Palapa

The house is cool at two in the afternoon and nobody has turned anything on. There is a square of garden in the middle of it with a tree in it, the rooms look inward at that rather than outward at the bay, and the air moves through from one side to the other all day because whoever built it did not have air conditioning and had to think.

That is the whole argument of this story. A Mexican house is not a style you choose from a brochure; it is a set of answers to heat, rain and light, and the words people use for it — hacienda, colonial, palapa, cantera — are names for solutions, not for decorations. Here is what six of them mean when you are standing in one, and the houses in our collection that show each one best.

Hacienda

Thick walls, stone columns, vaulted ceilings, and the rooms arranged around a courtyard rather than along a view.

Hacienda de Los Santos, up in Real de Conchas Chinas above Puerto Vallarta, uses every one of those words in its own listing: hacienda-style architecture with stone columns and vaulted ceilings, Spanish Alhambra tiles and crystal chandeliers, inner courtyard. Eight bedrooms, sixteen people, full staff from nine to seven. The photograph at the top of this page is its gallery — a corridor with one side open to the garden, which is the single most characteristic room in Mexican domestic building and the one visitors never photograph because it is not a room.

The point of the arrangement is temperature. The middle of the house is outdoors and shaded; the rooms never see direct sun; by mid-afternoon the courtyard is the coolest place on the property. Fifteen of our listings describe themselves as hacienda-style, and Casa La Vida Dulce out at El Banco in Punta Mita does the modern version of it — a hundred-foot infinity pool, a palapa for the table, and a pizza oven where the bread ovens used to be.

Spanish colonial

Older, taller, more formal. Arches on the ground floor, an atrium with light coming down into it, tile on the floors, and a staircase that is the point of the entrance hall.

Villa Estrella Mar in Amapas calls itself twenty-two thousand square feet of Spanish colonial architecture across several levels, and fills it with original folk art and furniture from Mexico, Central and South America. Casa Aventura in Conchas Chinas has what its listing calls a majestic atrium with cupola — a dome over the middle of the house with a hole of daylight in it — plus traditional Spanish tile and portico details, three living rooms and a pool with a rock waterfall.

Only eight of our listings use the word colonial. It is the rarest of these styles in a rental house, because it is the hardest to live in casually.

Palapa

A roof of dried palm thatch, usually over an open-sided room. A hundred and forty-one of our listings have one, which makes it the most common single feature in the collection.

It is not decoration. Under a palapa it is perceptibly cooler than on the terrace a metre away, because the thatch is thick and full of air and the heat never reaches the underside. It also sheds a tropical downpour that would clear a pergola in seconds. That is why on most of our houses it is not a feature beside the pool — it is where the long table is.

Casa Peregrina at Sierra del Mar puts its bar under one. Casa Septiembre on the Conchas Chinas sand calls it a thatched-roof palapa bar and grill. Hacienda Caracol on Soliman Bay has a beachside palapa, twelve-foot ceilings and an outdoor marble dining table. And at Villa Mixto in Quimixto — a village with no road into it — the palapa-covered lounge is effectively the house, with an open-air restaurant and bar beneath it and an organic design in natural materials, which in that location is the only way to build.

Talavera and cantera

Two words for the hard surfaces, and they come from opposite ends of the country.

Talavera is hand-painted glazed earthenware from Puebla — blue, yellow and ochre on white — and you meet it as stair risers, kitchen backsplashes and bathroom walls. Villa Veranda, a four-bedroom house in Conchas Chinas, describes colorful Talavera pottery and traditional Mexican decor, antique furniture, hand-crafted textiles, a covered veranda, a walled garden and a private courtyard entrance, which is a complete small Mexican house in one paragraph.

Cantera is volcanic stone, quarried across the centre of the country, soft enough to carve and hard enough to live on. Villa Ka Kuxta in South Akumal has cantera floors downstairs, handmade Talavera tile in the downstairs bathrooms and marble upstairs — three surfaces, three temperatures underfoot, one house.

Only five of our listings name Talavera and two name cantera, which says more about how listings are written than about how many houses have them.

The arch, and what happened to it on the Caribbean

Fifteen of our listings mention arches, and the Caribbean ones are a different animal from the Pacific ones. On the Pacific an arch is structural and holds up a gallery. On the Yucatán coast it has become the signature of a kind of modern building: smooth stucco, no sharp edges, a run of openings framing the jungle or the sea.

Casa Priakos on Soliman Bay is the clearest example we have — stone arches down one side of the pool, a blue-painted arcade on the exterior, and a rooftop arch that frames nothing but the sea. Casa Xixim, on the same bay, goes the other way: a solar-powered house with a live-edge wood table, a patterned Talavera accent wall, a rooftop hardwood deck under a solar canopy, a bamboo and macramé beach palapa and courtyard gardens with Mayan stone sculptures in them.

And in Tulum town, Villa Riad Ambre et Epices is sixteen bedrooms of round arches, stucco and handcrafted finishes that its own listing describes as Moroccan-Mexican-Mediterranean-Asian — a converted boutique hotel, and honest about it. Arches came to Mexico from somewhere else too; this is simply the most recent somewhere. Villa Las Puertas in Amapas does the same thing in one detail: Moroccan carved wood entrance doors on a Vallarta courtyard house.

Which one to book

If somebody in the group cares about the building, go Pacific and go old: Conchas Chinas, Amapas, Sierra del Mar. If the point of the week is light and water and a flat white roof to sit on in the evening, go Caribbean. If the point is dinner outdoors every night for eight days, the word to search for is palapa, and you will not be short of options.

And in every one of them the building only works because somebody is in it. A staffed house is the other half of the architecture — the courtyard is cool because the garden is watered, and the palapa is where you eat because the chef carries it out there.

Start with our fully staffed houses in Puerto Vallarta and tell Rocío which of the six words above you keep coming back to.