El Mirador

Today, few places have managed to escape humanity’s touch. There is little land that remains to be found and put to work. There seem to be no surviving hideaways; if they do exist, they have an insurmountable nature. These places can only be built upon with great effort, but if a person can puzzle out how to use them, that person will get the best seat of the whole show.

Alfonso Rosales was one of the lucky few to stumble upon a pristine location, situated in the Mexican town of Tapalpa, and Elías Rizo, along with his father, was one of those rare minds who was able to figure out the key to the place. The result is a modern reinterpretation of the everyday Mexican cabin, or cabaña. But the real star is the breathtaking view, giving rise to its name: El Mirador, Spanish for ‘The Viewpoint’. 

The land that cast its spell over its future owner, at the end of a long journey by car, was not easy to acquire: ‘I had to buy several other plots of land to get the owner to sell the one I wanted’, recalls Alfonso. Elías, who led the architectural project, underlines the unique nature of this particular parcel: ‘Unlike the others, this one had infinitely more natural richness, even though it was in the same place, and they looked very similar to the naked eye’.