Mazul – Ocean Villas by Revolution Architects
Mazul – Ocean Villas is a residential project of fifty beachfront villas on the coast of the community of Santa Elena El Tule, Oaxaca, Mexico. The project has been designed in 2020 by Revolution Architects.
Description
Mazul is a residential project of fifty beachfront villas on the coast of the community of Santa Elena El Tule, Oaxaca. The Master Plan is developed on a three-hectare site where fifty lots of approximately four hundred square meters were created. Each lot houses a villa of one hundred and twenty-five built square meters. The architectural program includes a clubhouse with a pool, terrace, restaurant, bar, and a beach club, as well as lush green areas distributed throughout the land with natural pathways and an operational and administrative area. Each villa is designed so that the interior and exterior space feels like one, a space that provides an area of shade, rest, and washrooms, allowing a unique experience of connecting with nature. The luxury of the project is the outdoor area and the beauty of the site. Following this approach, the villas have a basic program of one bedroom, a full bathroom, a living room and a kitchen and a terrace and a private pool outside. The pool is located in the front with the aim of cooling the wind when it passes over it towards the interior of the villa.
The design of the villa focuses on creating naturally ventilated and illuminated spaces, all of them have openings that allow cross ventilation which guarantees the interior comfort of the spaces. The concept of the development and the villas is to reflect an elemental and simple lifestyle, without luxuries or eccentricities. Contact and connection with nature is the true luxury, so the architecture had to be integrated into the terrain in the most discreet way while using cheap materials and meeting the limited budget. At the same time, it had to be extremely resistant to the climate, the storms and hurricanes that are common in the area and to be able to be quickly built with processes and common knowledge of any inhabitant of the rural community in the area. The site was of great inspiration for the design of the villa and the selection of materials and finishes for its construction. The villa had to be an extremely cheap, simple-to-build construction, so we chose to make a mixture of load-bearing walls of reinforced concrete mixed with a colorant of the tone of the sand of the site. The other walls were built of bricks and were covered with sand from the site. Both walls were finished with the same type of color but with different materials, offering different textures, some purer and others rougher. The design is basically three modules intersected with each other, the public area, the semi-public area, and the private area.
Each villa was carefully positioned within its lot to provide privacy and in order not to block the views from each other. Each lot has a perimeter barrier of natural plants delimiting each lot, maintaining the privacy of each villa.
Photography courtesy of Revolution Architects
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- by Matt Watts
