As soon as you drive out of the traffic of Mérida, Mexico, the lush jungle awaits. That’s what Angela and Scott Damman found when they bought a 22-acre hacienda in Telchac Pueblo, Yucatán, 33 miles northeast of the city. “When we first got to the gate…for as far as the eye could see in every direction, it was two to four meters high of small trees and weeds,” says Scott of the surreal experience of starting a new life in the Mexican jungle. “The vines were growing inside this house from every direction. Lizards, snakes, and iguanas were living inside here—the jungle just overtook,” adds Angela.

In 2011, the couple decided to look for a place near the small city in the Yucatán’s northwest, which was becoming a hot spot for artist and designer expats. Having flipped several homes in the U.S., they thought they’d try their hand abroad and bring along their then young children, India, six, and Finley, two. Scott had experience in real estate, while Angela was an environmental consultant trained in fashion design. Upon selling their refurbished home in Salida, Colorado—bought for $159,000 and sold for $365,000 eight years later—the Dammans procured the rundown estate for $210,000. “We were just going to flip it—live there for a year, learn Spanish, give the experience to the kids to live abroad,” Angela says. “But we loved it so much we wondered, How do we stay?”

Approaching the hacienda today, you’re greeted by a row of tall, thin palm trees interspersed with henequen agave plants, once the “green gold” of Mexico, used to produce twine and rope for export. The front gate opens to an expansive, neatly trimmed lawn, a man-made overgrown lily pond made of stone, and scattered ceiba trees. The courtyard is enclosed by three main buildings: a former carpentry shop painted in a classic hacienda red with white trim; a former office building, which is now the Dammans’ home; and a towering building in front that once served as a packing and storage space for the henequen agave.

The couple’s initial budget to fix up the property was $150,000, which they used to clean up the overgrown land, hire local stone wall builders and carpenters, and refurbish the electricity and plumbing.

“We sometimes get to a point where we wish we had, you know, another bedroom or a bigger pool. But then we think, How many luxury items do you even need in your life?”
—Angela Damman, designer and resident

The site needed a lot of work, as it had been sitting empty for 10 years. In 1986, Arthur Pogue, an American, purchased the 1880s hacienda directly from the ejidatario (communal landholder and administrator); after the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s, Maya land was repatriated from exploitative plantation owners to agriculture working families as ejidos. The original property at its height included tens of thousands of acres of henequen fields. Pogue parceled in two the 29 acres he had bought and sold nearly seven acres, including the main house, in 1999, keeping the rest for himself. Before he died in 2001, he began work on the carpentry shop and office building and planted many large tropical trees, including the palms.

The family first moved into the former carpentry shop. While it needed deep cleaning, painting, rewiring, and plumbing, it was the most habitable of the buildings. Now used as a guesthouse, it’s outfitted mostly with antique furniture found on the property and features a bedroom, a mezzanine, a living and dining room, and a white-and-blue-tiled sunken kitchen. The interior is dim and spacious, with cool stone floors and high yellow walls made from hand-cut, 20-inch-thick stone that regulates the heat. A white subway-tiled bathroom is connected via a breezeway.

In the former office building, the entrance foyer is tall and dark, and so are the bedrooms on either side. The plan then opens up into a bright hallway with arched floor-to-ceiling glass doors along the side of the house that gets the less-intense sun of the day. “It worked out perfectly with the house’s orientation to put in big windows along there, so we have plenty of natural light,” says Angela. The doors also allow for cross-breeze ventilation. (The stone walls used to ease the need for an air conditioner, until record temperatures hit in 2024 and the couple had to install one in their bedroom.) The hallway connects the office space and living room to the kitchen and dining area, and its windows frame an open terrace surrounded by palm trees and a quiet backyard.

The kitchen area has lots of found elements from the property that have been repurposed—like an island that sits on an old metal boiler and a multichain pot holder that hangs from the ceiling. There is also a colorful mix of flooring: Mérida pasta tiles, French terra-cotta tiles, and yellow stamped concrete that once matched the facade, which is now finished in a traditional white calcium-based paint, as is the interior.

Once the couple hit their budget, they focused resources on building a new business, the idea for which came from the hacienda itself. Shortly after their move, Angela saw a man around town wearing a cross-body sabucán bag, made with henequen fiber from plants she noticed growing wild on the property. Angela began working with local weavers, who use backstrap looms—portable tools with a strap that wraps around the artisan’s waist—many of whom had just about given up their craft because of lack of demand.

“Everything comes back to whether you’re willing to pull up your sleeves and get dirty. If you are, the opportunities here are abundant.”
—Scott Damman, designer and resident

Over the next couple of years, Angela worked with the artisans to refine the fiber of the henequen and sansevieria plants into something akin to a luxury horsehair. She then used the textile to make upscale handbags and soon branched out into home decor. The company, known simply as Angela Damman, is now a successful fashion and interior design brand that includes home decor accessories, furniture, and custom large-scale sculptural chandeliers, like the ones hanging at the Noa Santos–designed Banana Republic flagship store in Manhattan and the Sarah Myerscough Gallery in London. Angela also founded a weaving school, the Maya Youth Artisan Initiative, to strengthen the tradition, and she employs women from the local Maya communities of Telchac and Hocabá, among others.

As the designs took off, the Dammans had more funds to continue their renovation, including building a studio for the business in the old storage structure. They divided the space into an electrical and carpentry workshop, a place to build products, and a lofty studio/gallery, with the hope of one day hosting an artist residency. They also laid an insulated heavy-duty roof on top of the studio and installed a 7.5-kilowatt array. “It was $25,000 less expensive to do the solar array here than it was for my friends who actually own solar businesses in Colorado,” says Scott.

The space includes a kitchenette and a bathroom made from concrete finished in chukum—a smooth and shiny resin-like coating made from the sap of a native Maya tree mixed with limestone—with decor accents like handmade sansevieria rugs and woven baskets. “We took as much as we could from the property,” says Angela, “or went to the local person who might find something that we could incorporate that has that old, refurbished look without, you know, buying Restoration Hardware.”

People employed from nearby towns work by hand in artisanal ways and don’t use much machinery. “Everything takes so much longer,” says Angela. “You have to have a lot of patience, and you can’t go against the grain.… Fortunately, from our past experience flipping older homes, we were comfortable with the unknown and the many hurdles.”

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