Nestled among chili fields and palm tree groves, the new Vipp guesthouse in the artist-driven coastal town of Todos Santos, Mexico, is hidden in plain sight behind a modest wattle fence. Built in earth tones that mimic the local landscape, the house sits on a slanted rocky terrain interspersed with cacti and thorny shrubs. “Then you get inside that little gated area, and you’re just in a world of your own, which is spectacular,” Sofie Christensen Egelund, the third-generation owner of the Danish company Vipp, told AN Interior of the rammed-earth design by the Mexico City–based firm Pérez Palacios Arquitectos Asociados (PPAA). Christensen Egelund scouts for homes—whether newly built or historic—that resonate with the Vipp ethos of timelessness, good engineering, and design. She was driven to PPAA’s honest use of materials and handcrafted nature of their architecture and connected with their principal, Pablo Pérez Palacios, over Instagram. “We really kind of immersed each other in each other’s culture,” Christensen Egelund said. “[My husband and I] stayed in Mexico City at Pablo’s house, and he stayed at our space in Copenhagen. So that was a really nice addition. [It leads to] a great result when you’re good friends.”
About 4 miles north of the town’s center, where the real estate offer is mostly geared towards American “snowbirds,” Vipp Todos Santos sits off a bumpy dirt road among contrasting homes that are hard to ignore as they appear more focused on their air-conditioned interiors than their place within the landscape. This is certainly not the case with PPAA’s design. “It’s really about the space in between, or what we call ‘the defined empty space,’ in Spanish,” Pérez Palacios told AN Interior. “We think about what’s left, the part of the site you’re not building, because that’s literally how you relate [to the place]. I don’t even think we had a sketch or an intention about the facade. It’s just the result of the space you leave between in and out.”
The 3,800-square-foot, 4-bedroom construction was built entirely of rammed-earth walls with some concrete elements—mixed with the same sand to match the tone—throughout the interior and exterior. Three single-story buildings terraced at different heights intersect with an open plaza, a platform traced with a perfect circle in a geometric gesture that highlights the openness of the home, the entirety of which is never fully revealed from any one point.
“There’s no more to it: It’s sand, concrete, and wood,” said Pérez Palacios. The inventiveness thus lies in the subtle thresholds between inside and out. The earth floors absorb sunlight throughout the day and feel comfortably warm overnight. “The color was a challenge because you want something that doesn’t heat up too much so you can be able to walk barefoot, but not something super light that you need to wear sunglasses,” Pérez Palacios explained. “And of course, [it considers] the topography so it merges with the land, and we wanted to keep it as low impact as possible.”
The house is one of ten guest houses by Vipp, known primarily for their sleek and durable modular kitchens. In the main building, an open V3 kitchen, the latest design by Vipp and the first to be installed in anodized aluminum with extruded profiles and curved edges, transitions to a laid-back social area that blends built-in concrete furniture and soft long-lasting upholstered seating with slim polished-aluminum coffee tables with marble tops, also by Vipp. Oversized sliding glass doors from the living room and the main bedroom lead to an outdoor terrace with dining table cast in concrete—the continuation of the kitchen’s concrete peninsula—that comfortably seats ten people. Window frames and carpentry details like closets and beds are made from tropical tornillo wood cut and assembled in a workshop near Mexico City. Operable exterior shutters are made with horizontally woven sticks from local palo de arco trees that create textured shadows throughout the day.
Guesthouses are available for booking in Denmark, Latvia, Italy, Sweden, Andorra, and North America. A night at Vipp Todos Santos starts at $1,000, accommodating up to eight guests. Up next, Vipp Tunnel, by studio Room11 Architects, opens March 1 in Tasmania’s Bruny Island, and Vipp Lagrasse opens in the South of France later this year. Vipp Upstate, a project designed by Johnston Marklee, is also on the way in New York.