Studio Font Raises a Mazunte House on Ten Hollow Concrete Columns above the Oaxaca Coast

Casa Diez Pies sits on a rocky slope of nearly 40 degrees, roughly 50 metres above Rinconcito Beach in Mazunte, on Oaxaca's Pacific coast. Punta Cometa, the southernmost point of the state, is next door. Most houses on terrain like this begin with excavation: a platform is cut, retaining walls go up, and the hillside is replaced by a level lot. Raquel Font of Studio Font chose not to do that. The 250 m² house, completed in 2025, stands on ten large concrete columns that rest on the rock like isolated footings. The name, "Ten-Foot House", refers to those ten supports.

Lifting a house off the ground is an old idea. What interests us here is how far Font pushes it. The project is built from one module, repeated four times and offset by 50 cm in plan and 50 cm in section. The columns also do more than carry load. They are hollow, and inside them are the stairs, bathrooms, pantries, closets and storage. Structure, services and enclosure are combined in a single element, and the rest of the house becomes a set of open terraces placed between those elements.

A House That Barely Touches the Hill

The aerial views make the strategy clear. The house does not occupy a cleared patch of coastal jungle. It sits in the canopy, with timber roof terraces at roughly the height of the treetops and century-old cacti rising beside the walls. Because the slabs are carried on columns rather than on fill, the ground beneath them stays as it was.

The 50 cm shifts are the important detail. They are small, but they let each module move around an existing tree or step down with the rock without a cut. You can read this as a design method rather than a single gesture. Font did not design a form and then fit the site to it. She designed a module that could be adjusted until it fit the site.

Columns That Hold Rooms

The cast-in-situ columns are pale terracotta in colour. Their curved, rounded-end profiles refer to the eroded rock formations of Punta Cometa. That kind of reference often feels forced, but here the curves have a practical role. A rounded wall is easier to walk around on a steep path, it softens the gaps between volumes, and it shapes the interiors in a way a rectangular core would not.

The washroom shows the strategy at a domestic scale: a small concrete room with a cylindrical basin, set inside one of the columns. Because the wet rooms and storage are contained in these masses, the spaces between them can stay open on two sides. Several columns are topped with glass skylights, so daylight reaches the rooms below. Others carry planters that connect to the rooftop gardens.

Moving Through a Vertical House

On a 40-degree slope, circulation is the main design problem, and Casa Diez Pies handles it openly. External concrete stairs link the rooftop terraces and climb past cactus planters and multi-trunked trees, with board-marked concrete walls on one side. Getting from one room to another usually means going outside. Some clients would see that as a drawback. In a hot coastal climate, we think it is the right decision.

The interior stairs follow the same approach. Diagonal light from the timber slats falls across the concrete, and the stair inside a column becomes a narrow, carved passage between two open terraces. The result is a house that is always moving between compression and release.

Cooking and Eating at the Edge

The kitchen is restrained: a solid timber table with benches, wooden shelving, and concrete steps rising behind. Its most important feature is the open side. Full-height folding wooden shutters let the room open completely to the sea, so on most days the kitchen works more like a covered terrace than an enclosed room.

The enfilade view through timber-lined doorways, with exposed joists receding into the distance, shows how the repeated module produces a long sightline. Because each terrace is offset from the last, the view through the house is never exactly straight. It shifts with the plan.

Bedrooms with One Wall Missing

Each room is a stepped terrace between columns, opening through the shutters onto its own sea-facing balcony. The bedrooms make the most of this. A low timber bed sits on a raised concrete platform, a rock garden is visible through a rear opening, and the front of the room is a thin railing with the Pacific beyond it. Ceiling fans and the cross breeze through the open sides do the cooling work.

One image sums up the project well: louvered shutters folded back to frame a tree growing through the concrete terrace. The tree was there first, and the house was arranged around it. That is the minimal-earthworks principle shown in a single view.

Living on the Roof

Communal life happens on the upper terraces. Timber pergolas shade concrete daybeds and wood decks, a plunge pool looks out to the rocky coastline, and the bay opens to the west. Because the house steps down the slope, every roof becomes a terrace for the level above it.

The rooftop planters do real work as well. They return some of the green that the building's footprint occupies, so that from above the house reads as stepped garden as much as architecture.

Plans and Drawings

The plans show the puzzle logic directly. Staggered pavilions with rounded concrete ends shift against each other, ceiling fans mark the centres of the open rooms, and planted strips fill the spaces left by the offsets. The upper plan shows the rectangular pool and decks sitting over the masses below. The section is the most revealing drawing: a stepped floor and flat roof slab follow the slope rather than replacing it, with cacti and shrubs continuing beneath the house.

Why This Project Matters

The Oaxaca coast is under steady pressure from second homes and boutique tourism, and the usual result is a cleared, terraced, walled-off hillside. Casa Diez Pies offers a credible alternative. Its argument is not about appearance. It is that a house can be organised so the ground stays intact: ten points of contact, no flattened lot, and the existing vegetation left largely where it was.

The broader lesson is about method. A single module, a fixed 50 cm offset, and columns that carry structure, services and enclosure together make up a small set of rules. Applied with care, they produce a house that feels specific to its site, and we think that approach could transfer to other steep sites.

Casa Diez Pies by Studio Font (Raquel Font), Mazunte, Oaxaca, Mexico. Area: 250 m². Completed: 2025. Photography by Albers Studio.

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