PAROS HOUSE

The commission. Furnish an entire villa in Todos Santos without importing a single piece. The owners’ brief made sustainability a condition rather than an aspiration: everything in the house — furniture and materials alike — was to be made in Baja California Sur.

What that changes. “Made locally” sounds like a preference until it becomes a specification. It decides which workshops can take the work, which timbers and fibres are available in the quantities a whole house needs, how long each run takes, and how a piece gets repaired years later. We built the programme around the makers rather than around a catalogue, and specified to what the peninsula could genuinely produce at the standard the house required.

Why local is more than a footprint argument. Pieces made in Baja are made for Baja. Timber that has already lived in this humidity behaves predictably in it, and finishes get chosen by people who know first-hand what salt air does by the second season. Shorter supply chains meant less in transit and less lost to it — and when something eventually needs attention, the workshop that built it is an hour away rather than an ocean away.

Scope. Furniture and materials throughout — three bedrooms, a guest casita, the rooftop terrace built for sunset hours, and the pool and living areas — produced and delivered to site through MERCANTIL, working to Hillary Kent’s interior design and Casa Baja’s architecture.

Interior design by Hillary Kent. See our sourcing and custom production services.