Barefoot Luxury

Mexican Resort Living

Sandra Espinet

• Publisher: Gibbs Smith
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781423649373
• eBook ISBN: 9781423649380
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Latin America is known for its grand resorts and ultimate in warm-weather relaxation. And Sandra Espinet knows all about this elegant style, designing gorgeous home interiors in Mexico's high-end resort communities for the extravagantly wealthy. As a designer, Espinet has developed a signature style that assures ease and comfort while answering her clients' desires for plush, imaginative escapes. Her anecdotes and design tips will urge the reader to leave the workaday world behind and escape to the warm weather, glorious sunsets, and grandeur of Mexican luxury living.

Escape to Mexico

The meteoric rise of the Mexican resort as an elite destination for luxury, adventure, and relaxation is relatively recent, all things considered. Certainly since the nineteenth century, intrepid foreign visitors have braved arduous travel, bad roads, poor accommodations, murderous banditos, and parasite-riddled water to experience the violent beauty of Mexico’s desert habitats, mountain ranges rising dramatically from steaming jungles, and unspoiled stretches of coastline. But after the Mexican revolution, the government of the new republic settled on promoting tourism as a primary strategy for achieving modernization. Mass development of infrastructure did, in fact, draw a new breed of tourist (less bushwhacker, more beachcomber) to the colonial cities, cultural festivals, and monumental Pre-Columbian architecture—the very heart of Mexican culture—in addition to the sparkling aqua seas and pillowy-soft sand. By the 1960s, the tourism industry was fully flourishing, as Americans and Canadians of varying backgrounds and means flocked to well-protected resort destinations built from scratch to cater almost exclusively to Anglo tastes and high standards of convenience.

Mexican tourism officials may beg to differ and credit the country’s surge in popularity to its natural beauty, a rugged wild coastline scalloped with hidden coves, and new national highways crisscrossing the country and connecting it to El Norte; but if you ask me, the resort revolution was really sparked by a tabloid-fueled movie star scandal. A quiet, sleepy little coastal village found itself thrust into the spotlight during the filming of Tennessee Williams’s provocative Night of the Iguana in 1962. Paparazzi snapshots of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor drinking local beer at al fresco bars and cavorting along pristine beaches were immediately devoured by an international public fascinated by the love life of the world’s most famous woman. The Taylor-Burton affair turned Puerto Vallarta into a well-known tourist destination. Burton himself purchased a nine-bedroom villa in town for Taylor as her thirty-second birthday present, and one for himself across the street. A customized bridge romantically linked the two residences together. Today, Casa Kimberly is a meticulously restored boutique hotel with Bulgari toiletries, private Jacuzzis, rainfall showers, and Taylor’s own pink marble heart-shaped tub. You could say that Puerto Vallarta taught the world to pronounce the double L of an exotic Spanish-speaking outpost and set the pace and appetite for the type of elite resort playgrounds that sprung up seemingly overnight.

Here in the twenty-first century, a constellation of five-star beachfront retreats along the Pacific Ocean, the Sea of Cortez, and the Gulf of Mexico serve as self-contained worlds for the wealthiest and most discerning of vacation seekers. But real luxury these days is less about ostentation and entourage, and more about discretion and privacy. To adapt to the evolved proclivities of the new breed of extreme wealth, the resort communities I work with in Mexico offer private residences within the exclusive enclave, as well as luxury furnishings and products that are specifically tailored to environmentally friendly and locally sustainable specifications for the e...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Escape to Mexico
• The Reinvented Retreat
• Calm, Coolth, and Collected
• Artisanal Contemporary
• The Outdoor Oasis
• Acknowledgments