Nestled in the rugged hills of Morelia, Mexico, the House on the Hill by HW Studio presents itself not as a declaration, but as a murmur—an architectural whisper shaped by memory, protection, and terrain.

Drawing from the intimate image of a child shielding himself under a bed sheet, the design metaphorically recreates this primal gesture. A concrete vault lies beneath a verdant, undulating roof that folds into the landscape like fabric, suggesting a refuge that is both elemental and eternal.

This is a home that does not impose itself upon the land, but rather listens. Its four concrete walls—two anchoring the lifted terrain, two guiding arrival—are punctuation marks in a greater natural text. Here, architecture is not the poem but the pause, the breath, the hesitation between pines, fireflies, and distant birdsong. A solitary pathway leads to a centuries-old tree, so revered that the structure veers to honor its presence. This is not a promenade; it's a rite of passage, a pilgrimage into quietude.

The interior is a study in restraint. Public spaces open broadly to the forested ravine, while private areas turn inward, glancing skyward through a quiet courtyard. There is a deliberate absence of time-stamped elements—no visible appliances, no conspicuous lighting. The sensory language is distilled into four materials: concrete, wood, stone, and steel. Together, they evoke not minimalism, but a kind of rugged clarity, akin to a cave slowly merging with the forest floor.

Mexican architecture firm Tatiana Bilbao has designed Casa Ajijic, a summer house on Chapala Lake in Jalisco, Mexico.

An adaptable, integrated, vernacular and low maintenance was requested by the client for her summer house in the Chapala Lake in Jalisco. Combined with a simple housing program the geometry responds to the way it is constructed.

The cubes of the house represent the single parts of the family, which exist as individuals but also as a complete. The configurations of the cubes give possibility for individual space, by partly touching each other, partly overlapping and diving into each other. They create private, semi-public and public spaces in a complex way through a simple act. A house that can serve for all possible constellations that can come up in a family life.

The materials of the cubes are considered as a contrast of transparent and opaque, reflective (the inner space and the surrounding) and shining through. The openings orchestrate with the surroundings exposing permeability towards the views and protecting against cold northern winds. All of that shall give the complex of the building an appearance of simplicity and in the same way a very high complexity inside and in its relation to the ambient.

Constructing with the surrounding material rediscovers an ancient system which we often forget trough technological advance. Colors and textures in the walls and the landscape merge to bring house and environment together. A close relation with the client and a set of artists to design some interiors and furniture gave a further step to the customization of the living requirements for the users.

The Alférez House in Cañada de Alferes, Mexico, designed by Ludwig Godefroy Architecture, is a remarkable blend of the romantic notion of a cabin and the protective element of a fortress.

The holiday house is built to offer its inhabitants a strong sense of security while seeking to resemble an object that would have been deposited on the ground, among the trees. The result is a house characterized by the meeting of language between the idea of a cabin and a fortress, expressed in the use of concrete.

The house is designed with a compact footprint and a small foundation to avoid a complex and costly foundation due to the steep slope of the terrain. The house is mounted on the natural slope, flying among the pines on its southwest corner, and semi-buried on its opposite northeast corner. The house seeks to recreate the feeling of a cabin suspended in the natural topography of its terrain. The structure expresses a perfect balance of its foundation, generating a singular contrast between the feeling of lightness of a cabin on one side, balanced by the weight of a concrete fortress on the other.

The Alférez House increases its height to seek the light among the trees and at the same time form a relationship with the top of those majestic pines present on the ground. The house's configuration is developed in semi-levels around a double height, with high windows and skylights on the roof. The high volume of its double height allows the distribution of light in all interior spaces and compensates for the loss of windows on the first floor that protects the inhabitants from any intrusion.

The Alférez House is an excellent example of how architecture can be designed to balance contrasting elements. Its use of concrete as a protective material creates a strong sense of security for its inhabitants while providing a perfect balance of lightness and weight

In the small coastal town of La Punta Zicatela, Oaxaca in Mexico—where Pacific light bends through salt air and jungle humidity—Ludwig Godefroy’s Casa TO emerges like a mirage of contemplative mass.

At first glance, the structure appears monolithic, an opaque sentinel against the ever-shifting seascape. But step inside, and it becomes a sanctuary of light, silence, and texture—a kind of secular temple reimagined in poured concrete and local craftsmanship, where nature is both framed and foregrounded.

Godefroy’s design draws on the lexicon of ancient water architecture, referencing the sunken vaults of the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul and the geometries of Hornsey Wood Reservoir in London. Yet Casa TO is no mere homage; it is a formal distillation. The 600-square-meter residence is a choreography of elemental gestures: austere planes, rhythmic colonnades, and a lush courtyard teeming with vines, passionfruit, and banana trees. Here, privacy and exposure are negotiated by the sky itself, which acts as both ceiling and escape.

The interior draws chromatic cues from a singular vegetal presence—the blue Madagascar palm (Bismarckia nobilis) that once grew on the site—informing a palette of mineral greys, sea-touched turquoise, and sun-baked yellows. Materials are left unvarnished and tactile: concrete, steel, clay, wood. This rawness is not brutal but generous, inviting the visitor to slow down and sense the weight of time in texture.

In a gesture that transcends décor, the furniture within Casa TO is crafted by local artisans from Puebla, Guadalajara, and Oaxaca. These are not anonymous pieces but stories rendered in bamboo and timber, designed by Tiago Solís Van Beuren and others, and made available to guests through a fair-trade system. It’s a model of hospitality that merges economy and ethics, offering an intimate portal into regional making cultures.

In the forested hills of Valle de Bravo, a few hours from Mexico City, Copas House by PPAA unfolds as a vertical narrative in dialogue with the landscape.

Perched delicately on a sloping terrain, the 964-square-metre residence does not so much inhabit its site as it becomes a part of it—hovering between the canopy and the forest floor in a suspended choreography of concrete, light, and air. The house's guiding ethos is both ecological and experiential: a retreat that honors its environment by resisting the urge to dominate it.

What distinguishes Copas is not merely its integration with nature, but its spatial intelligence. Entered from above, the home inverts conventional spatial hierarchies—public spaces are elevated, transparent, and porous, while the private quarters burrow into the earth with intimate restraint. This architectural maneuver allows the upper level to act as a viewing platform, an open-air salon aligned with the treetops, shaded by the forest's own canopy. Public life here is framed by glass walls, shifting from pavilion to terrace to poolside lounge in seamless succession.

PPAA’s attention to materiality reinforces the house’s contemplative tone. The grey stucco surfaces—muted, mineral, unglossed—anchor the house within the landscape without competing with it. A curved fireplace wall and linear dining elements subtly guide the eye outward, drawing attention to the dappled light and arboreal textures beyond. Spatial sequences are rhythmic: bands of use flow from kitchen to lounge to open terrace, all unified by an unbroken horizontal datum that mirrors the horizon line formed by the surrounding treetops.

Beneath the public level, a descending stair reveals the private suites, their volumes recessed into the sloping ground. Each bedroom opens to its own balcony—shaded, inward-turning, deeply restful. The layout affords solitude without severing the connection to place. The lower level also houses a social lounge, utilities, and service rooms, all concealed in a partially buried floor. Sustainability is woven into the fabric of the house: solar panels, rainwater harvesting, and natural cross-ventilation articulate a quiet environmental ethic rather than an ostentatious green statement.

Gruta House in Valladolid, Mexico by Salvador Román Hernández and Adela Mortéra Villarreal is a sculptural home that blurs the line between nature and architecture, evoking Yucatán’s ancient geology.

Gruta House emerges as a contemporary habitable sculpture, drawing its inspiration from the Yucatán Peninsula’s geological features—caves, cenotes, and grottoes. Far from a mere formal exercise, the project redefines the relationship between human habitation and the primal architecture of the earth, inviting a sensory journey through scale, light, and materiality.

The architects’ restrained palette—gray-green pigmented concrete, natural cedar, and golden hardware—anchors the house deeply in its environment. As the sun arcs across the sky, the concrete façades shift in tone, animating the structure and blurring the boundary between permanence and impermanence. Cedar, referencing the region’s endemic flora, and glints of gold, evoking the subsoil’s mineral wealth, lend the house a tactile richness that resonates with the landscape’s ancient narrative.

Spatially, Gruta House unfolds like a cenote system, guiding the visitor through a sequence of compressed and expansive moments. The entrance, marked by a solitary poplar tree—a traditional marker of subterranean waters—ushers one into a vestibule where artist Andrés Briceño’s water intervention echoes Mayan purification rites. From there, a low tunnel leads to an expansive communal core, where a hammered concrete vault defines the living, dining, and kitchen areas, culminating in a cylindrical stairwell that ascends to a rooftop observatory.

Intimate and public spaces alike are choreographed around elemental gestures: bodies of water, open patios, and sculptural vegetation. The master suite, oriented around a cylindrical water feature and a mature flamboyant tree, epitomizes the project's exploration of light and shadow, permanence and transience.