Villas del Carbón
Project Status: Completed
Project Year: 2021
Use: Hospitality
Client: Private
Site Area: 5,718 m2
Location: Villa del Carbón, State of Mexico
Design: MCxA
Team: Monserrat Padilla, Luz + Forma, Saad, AKF, Three
Context
Villas del Carbón is an eco resort conceived as an introspective journey surrounded by nature, offering guests retreat and connection to the natural environment. The resort comprises 18 unique cabins, each varying in size and featuring distinctive design tailored to integrate optimally with the existing topography, vegetation, and contextual conditions of the site.
This individualized approach to cabin design reflects a philosophy that prioritizes site-specific responses over standardized repetition, allowing each structure to establish its own relationship with immediate surroundings while contributing to the overall resort experience. The property includes existing structures such as horse stables that provide opportunities for adaptive reuse, connecting the resort's contemporary hospitality program to the site's historical agricultural and equestrian uses.
Design Principles
The programmatic vision balances contemplative retreat with active recreation, offering diverse leisure activities and sports facilities including a spa for wellness treatments, a riding area capitalizing on the site's equestrian heritage, a restaurant and bar for dining and social gathering, and a convention center enabling the resort to host corporate retreats and events beyond purely leisure tourism. The existing horse stables will be renovated to incorporate a wine cellar, transforming utilitarian agricultural structures into atmospheric spaces for wine tasting and storage that become tourist attractions in their own right. This adaptive reuse strategy preserves site history while creating unique experiential offerings that distinguish the resort from conventional hospitality developments.
The design includes a new open space dedicated to religious events and meditation, conceived as a reinterpretation of a temple with circular layout emphasizing perfection, completeness, and the sacred geometry found across spiritual traditions. This non-denominational contemplative space provides guests with dedicated areas for reflection, ceremony, and spiritual practice while its circular form creates spatial equality where no position is privileged, fostering communal gathering and individual introspection. The temple's open design maintains connection to the surrounding nature, blurring boundaries between built sacred space and the landscape itself, reinforcing the resort's fundamental promise of introspective journey surrounded by natural environment.
