Casa Palma.

Casa Palma was conceived as a retreat within a retreat. Its floor plan is deliberately compact, each decision made to bring two people closer to each other and to the landscape outside. The walls are finished in a warm clay plaster mixed with pigments sourced from the Oaxacan coast, giving every surface a tone that shifts between amber and terracotta as the light changes throughout the day.

The private terrace faces a grove of cocos palms that form a natural canopy overhead. In the early morning, sunlight filters through the fronds in long diagonal lines, casting moving shadows across the hammock and the handmade ceramic tiles underfoot. By afternoon, the canopy provides shade dense enough that the terrace stays cool without intervention. This is a house where the architecture yields to the trees.

Inside, the bedroom opens directly to the terrace through wide folding doors made from locally harvested parota wood. There is no formal threshold between sleeping and being outside. A low platform bed sits at the center of the room, dressed in organic cotton linens, with a mosquito net suspended from a single ceiling hook carved from the same wood as the doors. The floor is polished concrete stained with natural iron oxide, cool underfoot and warm in color.

The bathroom follows the same logic of openness. A rain shower stands behind a low wall of stacked river stone, open to the sky above. A deep soaking tub, carved from a single piece of reclaimed tropical hardwood, sits beside a small garden planted with jasmine and ylang-ylang. You bathe surrounded by scent and birdsong, with nothing overhead but sky and the occasional palm frond drifting down.