Esencial Studio Scatters Earthen Pavilions Through the Trees of a Former Henequen Hacienda in Mérida

Sodzil House sits on ground that once belonged to Hacienda Sodzil, near the surviving Hacienda Sodzil Norte. That estate is one of the many remnants of Yucatán's henequen boom, when sisal fibre made the region briefly and unevenly rich. Today the area is a wooded residential pocket in northern Mérida. Inside it, Esencial Studio has completed a 435 m² house that reads less like a single object and more like a small settlement scattered among existing trees.

The interesting thing here is not the material palette, although the earth, stone, timber and weathering steel are handled with care. What stands out is the decision to break the program apart. The architects describe the house as cellular, a set of volumes linked by paths and terminating elements, closer to a dispersed village than a villa. That choice lets the trees stay where they are, gives every room a different relationship to shade, and borrows the logic of the hacienda compound without imitating its architecture.

Arriving Through Shade and Stone

The entry is low-key in a way we appreciate. Slender steel columns carry a slatted roof beside a rough stone wall, and the tree canopy does most of the work of announcing the threshold. Rather than a front door set into a facade, you arrive at a porch, a filtered pause between street and garden.

The stone-clad pavilion with its dark timber door makes the village idea concrete. It stands alone, tucked under a trunk, and it has the weight of a structure that could have been on the site before the house. From beneath the slatted ceiling the view runs past another stone wall, along a flagstone path, to yet another small volume. Movement through the house is a sequence of outdoor moments, not a corridor.

A Pavilion on the Water

The lily pond is the quiet center of the eastern garden. A paver terrace edges up to it, an earthen wall closes one side, and a timber-roofed pavilion sits just beyond. The composition owes something to the courtyard gardens of colonial Yucatán, but the scale is intimate and the gesture is restrained: water, a roof, a wall, a tree.

In full midday sun the pavilion almost dissolves behind leaves, which shows how much the project depends on the existing vegetation. Take the trees away and these small volumes would look exposed and arbitrary. With them, each one reads as a clearing.

Walls of Earth and Stone

The freestanding earthen tower with its narrow vertical slit is the most enigmatic element on the site. It stands on the lawn between the house and a boundary wall like a marker or a ruin, and it gives the garden a vertical reference that echoes the chimneys and water towers of old henequen estates without copying them.

Up close the surfaces carry the argument. Rammed earth meets a stone panel in raking light, ferns push up beside a pale path, and the upper earthen volume rises above a steel pergola. The architects call these materials honest and timeless and expect them to gain character as they age. The claim holds up best where the earth is left raw and the stone is laid rough, with no attempt to make either look precious.

Thin Steel Against Heavy Walls

The project's clearest structural contrast is between thick, earth-toned walls and the thin steel frames that carry timber canopies over the terraces. The walls give mass, shade and thermal inertia. The canopies give lightness, and they stop short of the trees rather than clearing them; on the garden facade a tree grows right through the edge of the dining canopy.

That accommodation matters more than it might seem. Many houses in Mérida's newer neighbourhoods clear the lot and replant afterwards. Here the roof outline bends around existing trunks, and the covered dining terrace sits in shade the house did not have to manufacture. Lightweight roofs over heavy walls is an old answer to the Yucatecan climate, and it still works.

The Pool Courtyard and the Open Edge

The courtyard pool ties the dispersed volumes together. Earthen walls frame it, a large picture window looks onto it, and the dining pergola sits on its edge under shifting leaf shadows. A covered terrace with outdoor sofas faces a small plunge pool and lawn, which makes this the most social part of the plan.

Inside, the boundary between indoors and outdoors is set by a sliding glass door instead of a wall. When it opens, the covered lounge and dining room become one continuous room against a cracked stone wall. In a climate where you spend much of the year looking for moving air and shade, this flexibility is the program, not a luxury.

Plans and Drawings

The ground floor plan confirms the cellular reading. Rooms line up along the west side, the pool courtyard opens in the middle, and a separate pavilion stands to the east. The upper floor stays narrow, a single bedroom wing on the west, so most of the site keeps a low roofline under the trees.

The sections are drawn with tree silhouettes on both sides, which is the right instinct. They show the two-storey volume, a long glazed ground floor, a stepped pool and a low stone pavilion, all held below or within the canopy. The trees here are part of the structure of the drawing, not decoration.

Why This Project Matters

Mérida is growing quickly, and much of that growth swaps the region's tree cover and building culture for generic gated housing. Sodzil House offers a different template. By splitting a substantial program into small volumes, keeping the existing trees and using earth, stone and timber, Esencial Studio shows that a 435 m² house does not have to land on its site as one block.

The project also handles heritage with a light touch. It does not dress itself up as a hacienda or quote henequen-era ornament. Instead it takes on the compound's spatial logic of scattered buildings, paths between them and objects that mark the land, and builds it in a contemporary language. That is a more useful kind of homage, and one other architects working near Yucatán's haciendas could learn from.

Sodzil House by Esencial Studio. Location: Mérida, Mexico. Area: 435 m². Year: 2025. Photography: Jasson Rodriguez.

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