The house was designed with one main purpose: to give the owner the opportunity to leave Mexico City to make a break with the megalopolis and urban habits, by coming to get some rest and relax while enjoying the heat of the Mexican coast and the peaceful light of Oaxaca. This house responds to a double landscape, on one side in the background the beach and the sea, on the other side the mountains and agave fields, the plant from which is made mezcal and tequila. This project has a very interesting personality of being a countryside house next to the sea, instead of a beach house.
The house is based on this duality, the duality of its surroundings and it’s able to respond to the mountains and be protective as a fortress as well as a wide-open space; giving you the feeling to live outside in a garden, making the border between in and out disappear. Zicatela House is built on a small 300 m2 plot, using a typology of defensive architecture, where a wall surrounds the terrain completely, helping create a 100% controlled area on the inside, turning it into an open-sky fortress, with only one main view towards the sky, the only permanent element in time.
The house is a bunker on the outside, one of those massive concrete structures I used to see in Normandy -where I was born-, protecting a Mexican pyramid on the inside, one of those I see when I travel around Mexico, the country where I’ve been living and working for 10 years now.
