This Oaxaca Retreat Defies Clichés of the Mexican Beach House

To get to Roca Ahumada in Oaxaca, Mexico, you take a dirt road off the highway that runs along the Pacific. A few turns later, past the small community of El Venado, a home finally appears: a series of low-slung concrete geometries—sharp angles, blunt walls, and curved segments—scattered with equal measures of rigor and whimsy along an invisible axis hurtling toward the ocean. The assortment of slate-hued brute forms contrasts with parota-wood-louvered sliding doors and the area’s tropical backdrop of tall coconut trees, evergreen shrubs, and lilac-colored trumpet vines.

In 2020, three friends involved in Mexico City’s film, art, and fashion worlds commissioned architect Ludwig Godefroy, who is also based in the capital, to create a vacation home that could be rented out when they weren’t using it and that bore little resemblance to what one typically finds in Puerto Vallarta, Tulum, or any other Mexican beach town. "We didn’t want a palapa," says one of the owners, Juan Carlos Martín. He first visited the area in 2009 while filming a documentary about Gabriel Orozco. (The famous artist has long had a house nearby.) A decade later, the filmmaker joined forces with two friends to buy about an acre on the same paradisial stretch of shore a little under an hour west of Puerto Escondido.

Juan Carlos and his friends had another wish—that the house be fortified against the elements (salt air, hurricanes, high humidity, harsh heat) while engaging the landscape with a variety of open and sheltered spaces flowing freely in and out of each other. Citing influences from antiquity and haciendas to Louis Kahn and Agustín Hernández, Godefroy, who’s French born, has made a name for himself with photogenic, concrete-heavy projects that tackle Mexico’s coastal climates with atemporal shapes—squares, triangles, and circles—tilted and toppled into inventive configurations.