- Project: Casa Chachalaca
- Architect: Juan Carlos Flores
- Location: Mexico, San Francisco (San Pancho), Nayarit
- Year: 2025
- Area: 685 m2
- Photography: TreeMedia
A House Suspended Between Jungle and Sea
High above the Mexican Pacific, Casa Chachalaca appears to hover amid treetops, its pale terraces and curved volumes dissolving into the tropical canopy. Designed by Juan Carlos Flores, the house captures a state of suspension—where horizon, jungle, and sky merge in a single panoramic field. The project sits on a steep hill thick with papelillo trees and palms, the natural habitat of the chachalaca bird that lends the house its name.
The challenge was steep—literally. A 25-meter drop separates the access road from the lowest platform. Flores approached the topography not as an obstacle but as choreography: a sequence of platforms descending through light, water, and vegetation.
Geometry and Concept
Flores imagined the home’s geometry as if a stone had fallen at its center, sending ripples outward in gentle waves. Straight lines represent the man-made; curves echo the natural. Their fusion shapes the architecture’s character—an equilibrium between control and organic flow.
This conceptual “shock wave” travels through the palapa, terrace, and perimeter pool, turning static structure into a sense of movement. Every platform, stair, and curved wall becomes part of this ripple effect, guiding the eye toward the horizon.
Arrival and Spatial Sequence
The house unfolds vertically, experienced through descent rather than procession. Entry is through a carved stone portal framing sky and water, leading to a reflecting fountain of hand-hewn marble. From there, a stairway in open air serves as a circulation spine, connecting living levels that cascade toward the ocean:
-
Entry and study/TV room, a quiet threshold space.
-
Fire-pit terrace and daybed beneath a wooden pergola.
-
Guest suite, accessed through a tall, narrow corridor for dramatic compression.
-
Palapa great room and main terrace, the social heart of the house.
Behind the curved sofa of the palapa, a vestibule distributes to the master suite, kitchen, and guest bath. The master suite opens directly onto the pool deck, with its bathroom connected to the water by a short flight of steps—an elemental ritual of bathing and immersion.
Structure and Engineering
To “levitate” the home above the forest, the team developed a reinforced-concrete frame anchored into the hillside. The large pool terrace acts as a structural diaphragm, tying the platforms together while concealing technical spaces below—cistern, surge tank, mechanical room, and staff quarters.
The house’s stability is quiet: the visible drama is not in beams or trusses but in the sensation of floating lightness achieved through precise engineering.
Material and Craft
Flores chose a limited material palette, hand-finished by local artisans. Each surface speaks of craft and climate:
-
Exterior walls: off-white cement and sand plaster, reflective under sun.
-
Interior walls: polished white cement, giving a soft, stone-like patina.
-
Built elements: bed platforms, headboards, and countertops formed in white cement.
-
Exterior floors: hammered white cement—cool, slip-resistant, and luminous.
-
Interior floors: gray microcement, seamless and tactile.
-
Bathrooms: polished gray cement with inset white bola stone for texture.
-
Roof: palapa structure of guayabillo wood with royal palm thatch.
Each finish is alive to touch and designed to weather gracefully; the house will age as the surrounding forest does—slowly, beautifully, and without pretense.
Light, Air, and Water
The palapa is not only an architectural symbol but a climatic machine. Its vast thatched roof breathes, ventilates, and shades, eliminating the need for mechanical cooling. Breezes slide between treetops, across water, through open volumes. The perimeter pool mirrors sky and amplifies airflow through evaporative cooling.
Sunlight enters laterally, grazing curved walls; interiors glow rather than glare. Even at midday, the house remains cool, its tones subdued to the rhythm of sea wind and foliage.
A Handmade Modernism
Though distinctly modern in composition, Casa Chachalaca is built entirely by hand. Every trowel stroke, timber joint, and palm frond reveals the labor of Mexican artisans. Flores’s design reframes luxury as craftsmanship and connection: a place where architecture slows to the pace of the landscape.
The Spirit of the Pacific
More than a house, Casa Chachalaca is an experience of horizon—a suspension between mountain and ocean, earth and air. It represents a quiet confidence in Mexican coastal architecture: rooted in tradition, guided by geometry, and sustained by climate intelligence rather than technology.
In Flores’s words, this is architecture “that listens to nature until the lines disappear.”
