In 2017, Deborah Castillo was walking on the beach in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, with no other people except a lone fisherman: “It was like a dream,” she says. “I love being on my own on a beach, reading or listening to opera.” The artist was visiting from New York City for an art fair, but she felt a pull to stay. She scoured the area for For Sale signs with no success, but after enough asking around, she found and bought a lot just a six-minute stroll from the beach.

Together with her longtime friend, Los Angeles designer Ana Lasala, Deborah began envisioning a home that could embrace Puerto Escondido’s contrasts. Here, the Pacific brings waves that attract surfers from all over the world but also hurricanes. And the abundant sunshine—another tourist draw—demands creative solutions for shade and cooling.

Deborah and Lasala, who runs the architecture firm Lasala & Lasala with her sister, came up with Palapa Concreta, a 1,560-square-foot structure reminiscent of an A-frame cabin with a concrete base enclosed by a palapa roof—a traditional thatching made with palm leaves. The design sheds rain easily while also providing ample shade, and by making the roof steep rather than wide, Lasala reduced the home’s footprint and preserved more space for the yard.

“It’s more like a temple proportion—very vertical,” says Lasala of the form. “You feel more like you’re in a little church.”

Approached along an unmarked dirt road, the home and its roof stand out against the blue sky and the low vegetation, but the design blends in with its broader surroundings, too. Deborah collaborated with the craftsman who built the palapa roof on the nearby Casa Wabi, a Tadao Ando–designed artist residency and exhibition space.

Lasala’s design shares some of the openness of Ando’s. The only walls on the lower level of the home are around the bathroom and where the roof meets the ground. Otherwise, nature and fresh air sweep through an open kitchen and a living area designed for socializing. Conversations mix with the sounds of birds flying by. Deborah’s three dogs—Human, Pita Amor, and Ser—lounge in the shade while her chickens wander in. Sunlight streams down from skylights, and wild plants that have spread inside dangle from the ceiling alongside sculptural pendant lights handmade by Deborah. Ivy laces the concrete walls. An upstairs balcony feels like a lookout tower, with views of the sparkling Pacific.

“Everything is continuous,” Lasala says. “I always try to bring the indoors out and the outdoors in—it’s a conversation between both languages.”

Deborah’s handiwork also permeates the home. The kitchen displays her creamy, handmade ceramic plates and mugs. She fashioned a sconce from a cactus trunk and reused bits of plastic, such as discarded pill bottles, as molds to pour concrete for clothing hooks and vases. On the upper floor, where a bridge connects two bedrooms, Deborah designed the bed frames, crocheted the rugs, and dyed the bedspreads by boiling avocado seeds to obtain a toasted-pink hue.

Budget constraints redirected Lasala’s plan to build a structure large enough to have a central garden. Instead, she designed a monumental concrete staircase that rises from the heart of the home. “For me, this is the soul of the house,” Deborah says. It’s multifunctional, offering an impromptu seating area for dining, surfaces for displaying her collection of concrete fruit bowls—also her creations—and even a built-in stove. At its top, the rustic slopes of the palapa ceilings evoke a tree house. And at its base, the staircase seems to tumble outside like a natural slope, leading down into the open yard.

“The verticality of the space makes it feel very generous. This is not a big house, but when you are in the rooms, it feels very open.”
—Ana Lasala, architect

There, Deborah’s succulent garden thrives. Local agave and cacti she foraged from nearby mountains create their own little fortresses, resisting drought and ocean winds. Looking out onto the peanut fields and Pacific beyond are Deborah’s workshop and a clay pizza oven she built by hand.

Overall, the home feels luxurious but also a bit transgressive and surreal. Its borders are permeable, and its spaces exist in a limbo between inside and out. A bird flew through the living room the morning I visited. But that all suits Deborah, who creates performances, videos, and installations that examine tensions between bodies and the political authorities governing them. Walking barefoot on the cool concrete floors grounds her, she says. And thanks to the way the roof cuts in toward the center at either end, she can shower while stargazing.

Deborah, who is originally from Venezuela and now splits her time between Puerto Escondido and Mexico City, welcomes many visitors and has rented the home out a few times, though now only to friends because some guests complained about the lack of air-conditioning. “I prefer the community of artists and creators who appreciate my proposal of immersion,” she says.

Palapa Concreta is designed not to resist the area’s contrasting natural forces but to evolve with them. As Lasala puts it: “A good building is a building that when it starts to disappear—if one day it’s eaten by the jungle or elements—its ruins are still great.”

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Lasala & Lasala Design Studio

Landscape Design: Deborah Castillo

—

Head back to the May/June 2025 issue homepage