Escape From Everything at This Silent, Solar-Powered, Artisan-Made New Hotel on the Mexican Coast

The main strip of Zihuatanejo, near the southern end of Mexico's Pacific coast, is basically a resort town — choked with all-inclusives, timeshares, jet skis, infinity pools, and all the other hallmarks of Big Travel, which favors convenience and familiarity over intimacy and locality. But drive an hour south, into an area of tropical wilderness below the Sierra Madre del Sur mountains that's interrupted only by small towns, and you'll arrive at Hotelito, a 13-bedroom boutique hotel that's the epitome of considered, off-the-grid peacefulness.
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This Cross-Cultural Couple is Carving Out a Space for Contemplation — And Furniture Production — in San Miguel de Allende

Part of what motivates designers Giulia Zink and Mat Trumbull of OHLA Studio is a question: “How do we build within the traditions of the past as new challenges loom?” The answer for OHLA, based in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and Los Angeles, is to balance a contemporary aesthetic with a respect for the region’s vernacular design and historic motifs, while turning to local and not-too-far-away artisans and resources to realize their projects.
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Three New Hotels by Star Designers — on Three Opposite Sides of the Globe

We're only halfway through 2022, and it's already a really good year for hotel interiors. The past few months saw the opening of quite a few properties by major designers we know and love, and today we're sharing three of our favorites, which happen to be on three opposite sides of the globe: the latest Ace Hotel, in Sydney; Habita Group's Terrestre hotel in Puerto Escondido; and 25hours Indre By, an oasis smack in the center of Copenhagen.
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The Mexican Studio Reinventing Everyday Objects

Algo Studio’s products — made from ceramics, cast concrete, resin, or terrazzo they fabricate themselves — are everyday objects that founder Diego Garza has thoughtfully reimagined with their ultimate function in mind. The results are attractive and original pieces in unusual shapes and commanding colors. “I’m trying to subvert or alter a little bit whatever is expected in an object,” he says.
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Week of April 26, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Yves Klein–inspired mirrors by Ben and Aja Blanc, a multi-colored Dims chair remix by Dusen Dusen, and the latest purveyor of high-quality affordable art to catch our eye (above).
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In This Mexican Ceramicist’s Pottery, Traditional Clay Gets a Refined and Contextual Upgrade

Eugenia Díaz Peon, a Mexican ceramicist who prefers to go by the nickname of Uxi, discovered her calling not very long ago. As co-founder of the Yucatán-based brand Région, she began traveling in recent years to remote locations outside of her home base in Mérida, to learn from the traditional craftspeople who typically work far outside the city. There, she was particularly drawn to a clay known as “el barro de Ticul," or the mud of Ticul. Rough, dirty, and filled with impurities, the clay is like a terracotta, but with a more luminous color and texture.
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A Round Table on the Ethics of Working With Artisans, and How to Respectfully Bridge Cultural and Geographic Divides

Over the last year, I've been laying the foundation for a new company that aims to connect Thailand and the U.S. through the universal languages of craft and design. I found myself thinking about how designers can foster a respectful, non-exploitive engagement when they're creating products with artisan communities rather than in factories, so I organized a roundtable discussion on the topic with three participants who have experience in bridging barriers of geography or culture: Peter Mabeo of Mabeo Furniture, Casa Wabi director Carla Sodi, and Tantuvi founder Arati Rao.
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Three New Design Hotels That Should Put Oaxaca on Your Post-COVID Travel List

Among the myriad reasons to visit the Mexican state of Oaxaca post-COVID — the mezcal, the pottery, the cultural diversity, the surfing, the fact that its fragile economy depends largely on tourism — are three new design hotels spanning the city to the beach: Grana B&B, Escondido Oaxaca, and Monte Uzulu. See all the pics after the jump.
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A New Jose Dávila Exhibition in A Stunning Brutalist Church

If you've ever visited König Galerie in Berlin, which is housed in a renovated 1967 Brutalist church with a skylit concrete nave, you'll know that there are only a few places in the world to experience contemporary art in such a breathtaking setting. There are also only a few artists whose work would be quite so at home in that nave as Jose Dávila, the Mexican sculptor who trained as an architect and is known for his focus on space, balance, and proportion.
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Tatiana Bilbao furniture

A New Furniture Collection by Tatiana Bilbao, the Mexican Architect On Everyone’s Lips

The Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao is known for a kind of socially conscious, contextually sensitive, human-centered approach — so in hindsight it was only a matter of time before she would turn her attention to the realm of interiors and the way people interact within a space. If you're in Copenhagen this month, we would highly suggest first going to see Bilbao's solo exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art to learn about her ideas and working methods. But then head straight back into town to Étage Projects, to see Bilbao's first furniture collection.
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Ian Felton’s Kosa Collection — Inspired by Pre-Colombian Cultures — is This Season’s Must-See Debut

Ian Felton's debut collection was supposed to arrive in New York in June, just in time for a showcase at Michael Bargo's Chinatown gallery. But, as luck would have it, the pieces — in transit from an atelier just outside of Mexico City — got stuck in customs and the collection, called Kosa, debuted only last week. In some ways, however, the new launch date seems appropriate: Felton's collection — all thick bolsters, chunky forms, and autumnal hues — was inspired by Pre-Colombian cultures and ideas around creation and rebirth — a very fall-like theme — not to mention how cozy it might be to snuggle up in the rounded corner of his alpaca-covered lounge chair.
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Colored Resin Meets Onyx in a Series of Textured Lamps Inspired by Mexico

In Elements, a colorful collection of imaginative light fixtures by Belgian-based architect Adrian Cruz, crystal resin light bulbs float, seemingly suspended, between resin plates, or balance atop slender pillars; some introduce raw materials like marble and onyx. “For me, the juxtaposition of onyx and resin [explores] the contrast between precious nature and modern man’s creations,” says Cruz.
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