HOUSE TAO
Hw Studio
ARCHITECTS
Hw Studio
LEAD ARCHITECT
Rogelio Vallejo Bores
TEAM
Juan Pablo Camacho Ayala
ARCHITECTS
Oscar Didier Ascencio Castro, Nik Zaret Cervantes Ordaz
CONSTRUCTION
Comaqso
CLIENTS
Gustavo Quiroz, Cynthia Rosaura Sandoval
STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING
Arga Constructora
PHOTOGRAPHS
Hugo Tirso Domínguez, César Belio, Gustavo Quiroz
AREA
472 m²
YEAR
2025
LOCATION
Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
CATEGORY
Houses
English description provided by the architects.
Some houses are not designed: they are remembered. Casa Tao was not born from technical lines, but from the silent memory of those who inhabit it. It is a house that does not aim to respond to an image, but to a life. Or rather: to a way of living.
Gustavo grew up in a humble house made more of effort than materials. The son of farmers and craftspeople, people with rough hands and generous gazes, who, although his studies were prematurely interrupted, instilled in him the desire to understand the world.
He grew up in Puerto Vallarta, a place on the coast of the Mexican Pacific, where the sun and humidity define the rhythm of the days and where shade is not an accident, but a precious good, a true refuge.
From the beginning, the house had to translate that need for shelter, introspection, and freshness. The concept of shade was not understood here solely as a physical phenomenon, but as an emotional condition: a promise of calm, of breath, of silent protection against a noisy world.
But Gustavo's personality—rich and complex like the place of his childhood—was what profoundly marked the design. With an uncommon curiosity, he is a man who has made self-taught knowledge his path.
Philosophy, architecture, music, photography: it seems to me that little is foreign to him. His library, with special editions by Alberto Campo Baeza, Fan Ho, Tarkovsky…reveals an affection for formal clarity, for essential geometry, for silent patios that converse with emptiness and light.
Conversing with him is to immerse oneself in an open gaze toward the world, deeply sensitive and at the same time precise.
His story with Cynthia, the second inhabitant, is also an essential part of this architecture. Together with their two daughters; Mila and Anto, they embarked on their first trip abroad, to Japan.
That trip left an indelible mark on their imagination: the aesthetics of emptiness, the compositional cleanliness, the stillness contained in every architectural gesture. They told us with smiles: "We would like to feel that we live inside a Japanese museum."
But they were not referring to the solemnity of the museum as an institution, but to that type of space that allows time to slow down, that lets light filter carefully, that makes silence tangible.
And so we tried. In a neighborhood without great views, except for a tree-filled plaza that offered shade and breeze, we decided to orient the architecture toward that freshness. But we did not do it frontally.
We avoided the use of large glazed surfaces that could intensify the heat. Instead, we proposed an oblique, skewed relationship that allows the presence of the plaza to be sensed without fully exposing itself to the heavy sunlight.
The dwelling is framed indirectly, as if the house observes diagonally, modestly, barely letting in the wind and the fragrance sent to us by a not-so-distant sea.
We placed the broadest program—bedrooms, garage, and services—at the base, and suspended a lightweight box, double-height, above it that houses the social areas.
This strategy allowed everyday life to be lifted off the ground level, surrounded by air, and opened toward the trees and the salty wind that crosses the plaza.
The elevated patios function as contemplation terraces: small platforms from where the fragrance of flowers is inhaled more intensely and the murmur of the wind among the treetops becomes a constant companion.
The bedrooms are organized around a patio that seeks silence and air. Here, intimacy manifests itself in enclosure, not as closure, but as an inner world. A curved wall welcomes the visitor gently, marking a cozy threshold, while a tree greets him as if it were a delicate floral arrangement.
The house does not open to the neighborhood: it withdraws, like one seeking seclusion. But it does not shut itself in; it opens toward the sky, toward shade, toward the plaza. Everything is arranged so that dwelling unfolds more slowly, more fully, more attentively to the invisible.
The materiality was an inevitably tactile and sensory decision. The whiteness dazzles under the coastal sun, while the concrete—heavy, honest—absorbs light delicately. It is a concrete that becomes warm through use and time. In this material, light does not bounce; it rests.
Casa Tao is, ultimately, an architecture born from the desire to inhabit the world with greater attention. A house that discreetly withdraws and offers its spaces as atmospheres of contemplation and memory.
In it, dwelling becomes an exercise of study, pause, and gratitude. Every corner invites one to stay, not to pass through, and every shadow offers itself as a promise of well-being.
This deliberate search for shade, as refuge and as a poetic quality, brings us closer to an understanding of space similar to that which Junichiro Tanizaki describes in In Praise of Shadows.
There, Tanizaki does not celebrate darkness as absence of light, but as a more subtle way of seeing it. In his text, shadow is not an obstacle, but a veil that dignifies; a way to amplify the depth of things, to allow beauty to emerge slowly, with humility.
Thus this house too: it does not illuminate forcefully, but allows twilight to suggest, light to filter without violence, making each space a nuanced, contained sensory experience, where time thickens and life quiets down.
