Izar Houses by Taller ADG

Valle de Bravo, Mexico

The Izar Houses. Photo © Rafael Gamo

Architects & Firms

When two brothers approached Mexican architect Alonso de Garay about designing a weekend family compound, they told him they wanted identical side-by-side houses. The site, on a steep hill, overlooks Lake Valle de Bravo, a two-hour drive south of Mexico City. For each house, they specified a generous foyer, two kitchens (one open and one for service), a living room, dining room, gym, five bedrooms, a family room, covered terrace and 25-meter lap pool. In addition, they needed a common area (each brother has four children) where the families could get together.

Two brothers wanted twin houses joined on this hillside site. Photo © Rafael Gamo, click to enlarge.

For De Garay, who studied architecture at Columbia University and worked for Foster + Partners in New York before opening Taller ADG in Mexico City in 2013, the biggest challenge was to site the houses—each nearly 13,000 square feet—so they wouldn’t appear too large. “I didn’t want it to look like a hotel,” he says, “so I broke up the compound into small buildings and integrated them with nature.”

The architect organized the twin houses on four descending levels. The uppermost one is devoted to a parking area and garage. A half-level down is an entrance plaza (whose concrete walls are studded with small local rocks) that leads into the main level’s living spaces.

De Garay divided up the living volumes into separate structures to mitigate the overall size. Spaces within are intimate yet open to nature. Photos © Onnis Luque

Here the architect divided each house into five individual but interconnected wood structures. Their exteriors are clad in Canadian cedar shingles, with roofs that are either pitched at different angles or are flat and planted with vegetation. The main floor sits on top of a poured-in-place concrete lower level, where the bedrooms, family rooms, and gyms are tucked into the hillside and are penetrated by light wells and skylights. The fourth and lowest level is outdoors, pushed away from both houses, where a common area, along with a pool, firepit, and outdoor kitchen, is located. The timing for the completion of the house was propitious. “Since the pandemic, the two families have been there full time and love it even more,” De Garay says.