Design Hunter

Design Hunter Mexico: what Casa Paros took to build

Design Hunter Mexico featured Casa Paros in its Casas section under the title El lujo silencioso de lo hecho a mano – the quiet luxury of the handmade. Words by David Solis, photography by Tomas Laffaye.

The design story belongs to Hillary Kent. What follows is the other half: what a house like this asks of the people who have to source and make it.

Nothing was bought ready-made

Every piece in the house was commissioned. That sentence is easy to write and hard to deliver, because it means the schedule is set by workshops rather than by warehouses. Teak was worked by family workshops in Miraflores. Woven lighting came from La Paz, embroidery from Cerritos, ceramics from Todos Santos. Natural pigments, plant fibres and volcanic stone carried the palette.

Commissioning at this scale means holding perhaps thirty separate relationships to a single install date, each with its own capacity, its own materials and its own idea of a deadline. That coordination is the service. It is also why the house has no catalogue pieces in it.

Why more than 75% of it came from nearby

Solis records that over three-quarters of the materials were sourced within a short radius of the site, and frames it as an ethical decision rather than a sustainability claim. That is the right framing. It was also the harder option: Baja California Sur has real constraints – water scarcity, long logistics, and materials that simply are not available in-state.

Where a skill genuinely did not exist nearby, we went to Oaxaca and Guadalajara and nowhere else. Sourcing locally is not a marketing position for us; it keeps the money and the skill in the workshops we depend on, and those workshops are the reason we can promise work that cannot be reordered from a catalogue.

What this means if you are commissioning

Casa Paros is a private residence, but the model behind it is the same one we run on hotel and restaurant projects: a network of more than 500 master artisans across Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean, managed against a real construction programme.

If that is the kind of project you are planning, our custom furniture sourcing page explains how the process runs.

Related Work

Explore more Mercantil projects: Four Seasons Cabo San Lucas Adventure Center, Gavilán Hilltop, Paros House. Learn about our custom furniture sourcing.