When Boma chose Artigas Arquitectos for the architecture of Country Lakes, the decision was not about style — it was about thinking. Artigas, founded in 1939 and with more than 2,500 projects across 87 cities in the Americas and Europe, does not have a fixed visual language. It has a methodology: understand the place before proposing the form.
The material palette as an answer to the tropics
Yucatán has a particular light. It is not the light of the Mediterranean nor of the wider Caribbean — it is more horizontal, warmer, with a diffuse quality during the central hours of the day that makes glossy materials feel aggressive and natural materials grow deeper. Artigas read that and built the project’s material palette from it.
The project’s primary materials:
- Chukum — an artisanal Yucatecan stucco with natural pigments, a slightly rough surface that absorbs light
- Tzalam — a hardwood from the Yucatán jungle, used in pergolas, frames, and elements that articulate indoor and outdoor space
- Regional limestone — for plinths, exterior floors, and retaining walls
- Exposed concrete — in slabs and cantilevers, as a counterpoint to the warmth of the natural materials
- Water — as a reflecting material, not merely a functional one: the reflecting pools before the clubhouse double the building and the sky
The clubhouse: a single gesture
The Country Lakes clubhouse is the most representative building of the project. Artigas conceived it as an open pavilion: a broad concrete roof floating over a glazed volume, surrounded by water on three sides. The spatial logic is simple and powerful — interior and exterior dissolve into each other because the temperature, the cross ventilation, and the view of the lake make separation unnecessary.
The approach is a sequence of compression and expansion that Artigas handles with precision: you arrive through a low portico, shaded and domestic in scale, and emerge into the great central space with a full view of the course and the lake. The surprise is intentional and measured.
The timeless as the objective
“Designing with local materials is not an ecological gesture — it is the only way for a building to look as though it was always there.” — Artigas Arquitectos
Artigas’s obsession with timelessness is what makes its buildings age well. The chukum that is a year old today will, in ten years, have the living texture of a structure that has stood in its place for decades. The tzalam wood will darken with time and sun. The concrete will gather the patinas of the tropics. All of it is anticipated — the building is designed to improve with time, not to resist it.