In the desert outside Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico City-based practice Studio Font broke a single boutique hotel into a scatter of architectural pieces, then let the pieces behave like ruins. Founder Raquel Font spread three guest rooms and one communal structure across an eight-thousand-square-meter plot of cacti and open sky, rather than gathering the property under one roof. The result reads less like a finished object than a permanent framework, built to register the passage of light, rain, and time rather than resist it.
A fragmented floor plan distributes the hotel’s program across the site instead of enclosing it under a single volume. Each room secures its own privacy and its own relationship to the Sierra de la Laguna Mountains and the Pacific Ocean beyond, while the fragmentation itself becomes the project’s organizing idea: containment for the guest rooms, openness for the shared spaces that hold the property together.
Three guest rooms sit at different orientations across the landscape, each conceived as a single continuous interior where sleeping, resting, and bathing coexist without walls between them. Curved interior surfaces open onto three framed windows, each capturing a different slice of desert and giving the same room three distinct atmospheres over the course of a day. Beds, seating, storage, and bathrooms are built directly into the concrete envelope, and a stair to the roof extends the room vertically, toward sky and horizon.
Two crossing roofs hold the property’s shared life together, unfolding around a double-height fire pit and a cascading cylindrical pool. Fully open along its length, the building keeps a continuous line of sight to the desert in every direction; overlapping planes cast deep shade, and changes in floor height guide movement through the space without a single partition wall.
A single material does the work of structure and finish throughout: Studio Font builds Nereidas entirely in pigmented concrete, rather than applying a surface afterward. The pink tone shifts with the light across the day, and intensifies against the surrounding vegetation after rainfall, when the desert scrub turns visibly greener around the rose-colored walls.
The property runs off-grid: photovoltaic solar panels generate its electricity, a thermosolar system supplies hot water, and water reuse strategies reduce demand on local resources. Every plant displaced during construction was replanted on site, so the desert ecosystem closes back around the building rather than starting over beside it.
A similar ecological restraint shapes other new hospitality projects across Mexico. In Tulum, V Taller’s Babel returns nearly 40% of its site to the surrounding jungle, treating land conservation as a design brief in much the same way Nereidas treats the desert it was built into — as a condition to work with, not around.
Further up the peninsula, a similar hospitality instinct is reshaping small-scale hotels across Baja California. In San José del Cabo, RA!’s Laiva Hotel San Jose uses a warm, monolithic material palette and a porous plan to root a boutique stay in its immediate context, the same instinct that scatters Nereidas’ rooms across its own stretch of desert.
A contemporary ruin is how Studio Font frames the underlying idea: a permanent framework built to support habitation while still leaving landscape, climate, and time free to act upon it. At Nereidas, that framework is the fragmented plan itself — three rooms and one shared structure, scattered rather than sealed, left open to the same desert that will keep working on their concrete walls long after the crew has gone.
Nereidas Homes by Studio Font | Location: Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico — Year: 2025 — Key materials: pigmented concrete