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A Mexican retreat, about 40 minutes west of the heaving megalopolis of Mexico City, brings sand-coloured brick curves into a dense pine forest flanked by a bustling highway. The structure, a family home titled Casa Jajalpa, designed by the Mexican practice Lanza atelier (newly announced as architects of the Serpentine Pavilion 2026) turns a blind wall to the endless sprawl of the city, opting instead to embrace the local landscape by domesticating a sliver of the forest.
Step inside this brick-clad Mexican retreat
The conceptual strength and clarity that have come to characterise the emerging studio’s work, which ranges from furniture to ephemeral pavilions and museum exhibition design, is present in the home’s layout – one gestural stroke materialises as the curved wall that envelops the otherwise orthogonal project.
‘When we first approached the site, we noticed a clearing at its centre, where a dramatic, green-tinged light seeped through the trees during the day,’ recalls Isabel Abascal, who founded Lanza atelier in Mexico City in 2015, alongside her partner and co-director, Alessandro Arienzo. This verdant glow became the design’s guiding principle. ‘From there, our premise was clear,’ says Abascal. ‘The clearing would be left largely intact, the house organised around it, and everything connected through a wall that bends around the existing vegetation.’
The clients, a family of four, sought a retreat from city life within a spacious home intimately connected to nature, and gave the studio free rein over the design. Five bedrooms and a studio space are found in the main volume. Across from it, a guest area with a bar, a gym and two guest bedrooms connects to the house through a narrow hallway, which offers glimpses of the clearing through a brick lattice wall.
Despite the project’s resolute introversion, the surrounding forest is still an imposing presence. Windows frame abstract fragments of the landscape, while overhead openings capture portions of the towering pines, and invite in sunlight to warm up the house. ‘Understanding how the sun would travel through the house was a very basic consideration,’ says Arienzo, ‘because it’s one more element that establishes a connection to the changing landscape.’
The sense of proximity with nature that Arienzo describes is heightened by the material qualities of the home. Featuring a curved concrete slab roof and Encino wood floors, the structure was built entirely with tabique blanco, a light brick produced in the nearby state of Puebla. Due to their porosity, the exterior-facing bricks establish a symbiotic relationship with the natural environment, acquiring a greenish hue when rain abounds, and becoming more golden during the dry season.
‘In all of our projects, we strive to avoid spaces with marked differences between interior and exterior,’ says Abascal. ‘And though this house appears to be quite introspective, there are also many gradations between inside and outside.’ Though undeniably contemporary in form, the project echoes both the medieval enclosed gardens of the Moors, and the 20th-century ‘emotional architecture’ of Luis Barragán and Mathias Goeritz, who sought to counteract the sterility of European modernism.
‘We try to use materials that are endemic to the region and can be assembled by locals’
Isabel Abascal & Alessandro Arienzo
In countries such as Mexico, where vernacular architecture is still alive and well, and skilled artisans still abound, it is possible for designers to establish links between their work and the traditional techniques that have become inaccessible in other parts of the world. This opportunity is not lost on Lanza Atelier and its local contemporaries; in recent years, Mexican architecture has been lauded for embracing a local identity.
‘We try to use noble materials that are endemic to the region and can be assembled by a local workforce,’ says Arienzo, describing the process as a horizontal exchange of knowledge with artisans and construction workers. ‘Normally, a project with curves such as this one would be built with concrete,’ adds Abascal. ‘But using brick made sense for many reasons: the house’s relationship to its context, its colour, its texture. Bricks also made it a home that almost could not have been built elsewhere, because of the relationship between architects and the skilled artisanal workforce unique to Mexico.’
A version of this article was first published in Wallpaper* December 2020