Z and BCG Arquitectos Wrap a Villa Carlos Paz Hotel Annex in Folded Metal, Red Steel and Lake Views

Villa Carlos Paz is one of Argentina's busiest holiday towns, a lakeside resort in the Córdoba hills where hotels compete for attention along the same few streets. Estilo MB Hotel, completed in 2018 by Z and BCG Arquitectos (lead architects Juan Becerra, Julián Campise, Sebastián Giri and Carlos Zanoni), sits in that context. The same practice designed and built the original hotel. The photographs and drawings point to a second chapter: a low, angular block set beside an existing tower, joined to it at ground level and dressed in a folded skin of perforated panels.

What interests us is the restraint of the move. In a resort economy that rewards height and spectacle, the architects added a podium that stays low, works the street edge hard, and saves its theatrics for the inside: a restaurant set among red cylindrical columns, a rust-red steel stair, and terraces that frame the lake. It is a lesson in how a hotel can grow by improving its ground floor rather than stacking more rooms.

A Low Block Beside a Tall Neighbor

From the street, the relationship is clear. A slender tower of stacked balconies rises behind, and the new volume holds the sidewalk in front of it. Seen from the corner, the building steps down in glass and stone, so the tower reads as background and the podium as the public face of the hotel.

This is a sensible division of labor. Rooms and views go up; the parts of a hotel that townspeople and passing tourists actually use, such as dining, lounges and events, stay at grade where they can catch foot traffic. The project's perspective drawing suggests a further tower is planned for a later stage, which makes the podium read as a base the site can keep building on.

The Folded Skin

The defining surface is a field of faceted, perforated panels that fold in and out across the upper floors. Under the hard Córdoba sun, each fold throws a different shadow, so the facade changes through the day without moving. The perforation softens what could otherwise be a heavy, dark mass, and it likely filters light into the rooms behind.

The panels meet timber soffits, glass balustrades and round white columns at the terrace level. That mix could have become a material catalog. It holds together because the facets do the main visual work and everything else stays plain. The facade study among the drawings shows the triangulated pattern was worked out as a tiled grid, a sign the architects treated the skin as a system, not a one-off sculpture.

Glazed at Grade, Glowing at Night

At ground level, the building opens up. A fully glazed restaurant frontage sits behind planters on white gravel, and faceted lights in the soffit repeat the geometry of the panels above. After dark, a translucent glass box glows beside a stone-clad entrance stair, turning the hotel into a lantern on a street otherwise lit by headlights.

The entrance stair, set between slate walls with diagonal strip lights in its canopy, is a small but well-judged piece. It gives arrival a sense of ceremony without a porte-cochère or grand lobby frontage, and the diagonals keep the angular language running from facade to threshold.

A Restaurant Organized by Red Columns

Inside, the structure becomes the decoration. Round columns painted red march through the dining room, set against a black exposed ceiling with visible ducts and a faceted timber wall panel behind the banquettes. The palette of pink, coral and red chairs is bold, but the columns anchor it, so the room feels deliberate rather than loud.

Leaving the ceiling raw is the right call for a resort restaurant that needs to feel casual by day and atmospheric by night. Copper pendants in the café and the dark overhead plane let the red elements carry the space, while the glazing keeps palm trees and the street in view.

The Red Steel Stair

The stair is the interior's set piece: folded rust-red steel treads screened by thin vertical rods, rising past concrete and overlooking the dining hall. The rods make it transparent enough to share the room with diners and solid enough to read as an object.

It also connects the two moods of the building. The red ties it to the columns below, and the folded profile echoes the facade outside. A stair this visible turns circulation into something guests watch and use, which is exactly what a hospitality podium should do.

Terraces That Frame the Lake

Higher up, the building turns toward Lake San Roque and the surrounding hills. Dark concrete frames and glass balustrades edge tiled terraces, and a covered terrace with a timber slat ceiling catches the low evening sun. The frames act as viewfinders, cutting the panorama into composed pictures of rooftops, water and ridgelines.

Dining rooms behind floor-to-ceiling glazing with timber mullions do the same at table height. In a town whose main asset is its landscape, giving the shared spaces rather than only the premium suites the best view is a generous choice.

Lobby, Rooms and Events

The reception desk is fronted in marble against a textured red wall, a quieter cousin of the restaurant's columns. The double-height lobby with its glass mezzanine and polished floor gives the hotel some vertical breathing room, while lounge areas with beige sofas and striped rugs calm the palette down.

Guest rooms and corridors are more conventional: wood headboards, floating shelves, linear ceiling lights and dark door frames. The conference hall, with red upholstered seating under glowing ceiling coves, shows that the podium serves events too, which matters for a resort hotel that needs business outside peak season.

Plans and Drawings

The plans explain the geometry. The site is a wedge, and the ground floor fills a triangular lot with a long bar, dining tables among a regular column grid and a zigzag terrace edge. The general plan shows two footprints joined around a large hall and shared cores, confirming the podium works as an extension of the existing hotel rather than a freestanding building. On the upper floor, a central corridor serves guest rooms whose angled bay windows produce the folds seen on the street.

The interior line drawings and the steel shelving axonometric show how far the design reached into furniture and fit-out, while the perspective of a future tower above the podium suggests a phased plan for the site.

Why This Project Matters

Most resort hotels grow by adding rooms. Estilo MB grows by adding a ground floor worth visiting: a restaurant, café, lounge and event spaces that face the street and the lake. Returning to their own building gave the architects an unusual advantage, since they could plan the addition against a structure they already understood and lay groundwork for a later phase.

The architecture is not timid. The folded skin, red columns and steel stair are confident moves. They are also disciplined: the facets follow the angled bay windows in plan, and the red structure organizes the interior. For anyone designing in tourist towns, where buildings often trade substance for signage, this is a useful model of how to be noticed for the right reasons.

Estilo MB Hotel by Z and BCG Arquitectos (Juan Becerra, Julián Campise, Sebastián Giri, Carlos Zanoni). Villa Carlos Paz, Córdoba, Argentina. 2,700 m². Completed 2018. Photography by Gonzalo Viramonte.

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