“I think the Marions cared more about their art than the views of the ocean. The house was well built, but everything was pretty dark,” the wife recalls.
“It felt a bit like a Hollywood idea of an old-world hacienda, something you might find in Beverly Hills or Palm Beach. It was never going to be authentically Mexican, but we still wanted it to reflect the spirit and soul of Mexico. We decided the only way to go was whimsical, to embrace the vibrant color and culture of this place,” she adds.
The homeowners engaged Mexico City–based designer Antoine Ratigan to give the estate a fresh, contemporary makeover, capitalizing on the structure’s underexploited connection to the sea and sky.
“The spaces were very gracious, but the house felt stuck in the ’90s. We tried to bring it back to life by opening up views and ushering in lots of natural light,” Ratigan says of his assignment. His boldest move was the wholesale reinvention of the expansive courtyard, essentially making it an organic extension of the interiors, intimately tied to the social life of the home and the daily rituals of its inhabitants. Ratigan replaced an existing pavilion, which strangely blocked sight lines from the house to the pool and the beach beyond, with an open-sided, columned canopy perfect for alfresco repose. He also expanded the indoor-outdoor dining room, refashioned the pool and pool deck, overhauled cloistered balconies, and completely transformed the house’s many baths with a rainbow coalition of handmade tiles by Talavera de la Reyna—all in the service of amplifying the home’s vibe of sprightly sophistication and serious comfort.
“The bones were mostly there. We just needed to dislocate a few and add a few new ones,” says the wife, who shepherded the renovation project with an obsessive focus on every minute detail. “Frankly, I was a pain in the ass, but I’m okay with that. My goal was to create a home that would evoke emotion and inspire our guests and our family. The story we were trying to tell had to feel authentic and true.”
The final layer of artful ornamentation and decorative derring-do came courtesy of Rodman Primack (of AD100 firm RP Miller) and Rudy Weissenberg (Primack’s life partner and collaborator in Mexico City’s AGO Projects), who built upon Ratigan’s roster of artisan collaborators with special commissions and signature pieces by a broad range of contemporary Latin American designers and artists, including Weissenberg himself, Agnes Studio, Pedro y Juana, and Marcela Calderón. Weissenberg also enlisted tattoo artist Christian Castañeda (a.k.a. Xian of the Death) to develop a custom iconographic language that was translated into everything from bedding embroidery and stationery to the ceiling mural that crowns the bar.