When Seattle-based designer John Van Dyke visited Cabo Corrientes for the first time nearly a decade ago, he found a kind of place he thought no longer existed. The pristine mountainside and endless beach were easily accessible—located two hours southwest of Puerto Vallarta on Mexico’s Pacific coast—but far from the throngs of tourists. “It reminded me of Baja and Cabo San Lucas 40 years earlier.”
The house Van Dyke designed for himself, working with Puerto Vallarta–based TW Arquitectos, fuses modern influences and local building techniques in a pavilion-like structure perched on the cape’s rolling topography. A stonewalled entrance hall opens up to the singular public space of the upper level with unobstructed ocean views. There, a pair of parallel stuccoed walls features a combination of reinforced- concrete structural columns and adobe brick infill. While the northern wall is solid, openings in the southern wall are unglazed, the western face is left completely open, and the large living-area-cum-terrace culminates in a long rectangular pool. The indoor-outdoor spaces and the de Stijl geometry of the house’s volumes are a nod to Rudolph Schindler, although Van Dyke also aspired to evoke the minimalism of Mexican master Luis Barragán.
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