Cabins on Stilts with Minimal Footprints
In Mexico’s beautiful wine country, twenty unusual boxes sit on steel stilts overlooking a serene 40-acre winery. Designed by Tijuana architectural studio Jorge Gracia, the property is known as Endémico Resguardo Silvestre.
These steel and glass boxes are guest accommodations called EcoLofts. Their design is meant to make as little impact on the surrounding landscape as possible while providing a singularly spectacular vacation experience.
Each pod boasts a diminutive 200 square feet of interior space, keeping with the property’s purpose of making an almost unnoticeable mark on the surroundings.
While the exteriors of the EcoLofts are austere and low-key, the interiors are truly luxurious. The ultra-modern and comfortable interiors are a purposeful contrast to the pods’ small sizes, providing a camping experience that is uniquely well-appointed.
The EcoLofts all feature small terraces complete with outdoor clay fireplaces, allowing visitors to sit outside and enjoy the landscape while taking advantage of a cozy fire.
The steel stilts, perhaps the most noticeable feature of the small individual cabins, keep the structures away from contact with the soil. If the pods were to disappear from the valley tomorrow, there would be almost no telltale signs that they had ever been there at all.
From Archdaily:
“One of the principal premises was not to interfere directly the land, as part of the philosophy of the project is to respect nature in every possible way. The availability of steel by our client lead to the design of the clean structure with this material, which elevates the skeleton of the room, named EcoLoft, to avoid contact with the soil. The employment of corten steel to cover it, which over time changes its color, achieving harmony between the environment and the building.”
“The approach of the design of the room comes from the concept of a ‘deluxe’ camping house, covering the guest’s basic needs, being in contact with nature and the environment.”
