Casa Copycha: A 20-Metre Palapa Tops a Puerto Escondido Beach House

By Amara Osei

A 20-metre palm-leaf palapa now shades a private family compound on the sandy coast of Puerto Escondido. Casa Copycha, designed by the Mexico City– and Querétaro-based studio Anonimous, is the holiday home the architects themselves describe as a building that listens.

The project is a single-family residence on a residential plot a short walk from Puerto Escondido's local airport. Anonimous shaped it around a central, slightly sunken courtyard, a move borrowed from Mexican monasteries and haciendas but, the firm insists, not deployed as nostalgia.

What did the clients actually want?

"A more private life for rest and pause, and a profound interaction between the interior and exterior: leaving one space, walking through the portico, and encountering the vegetation, the sun, the air, and the summer rain," the architects told Wallpaper*.

How does the plan work?

The courtyard doubles as circulation. It threads the entrance through to the family rooms, terrace and pool beyond. An exposed concrete base anchors the house to the sand, then lifts into a gateway wall. Up top, the palapa — 20 metres long, 12 metres wide — runs the length of the social spaces, built from parota wood and dried local palm, the studio's nod to regional craft.

Where do the bedrooms sit?

On the upper floor. Anonimous placed all private rooms above the social level, opening them to breezes and ocean views through large apertures. Down below, the main living areas, decks and swimming pool face the Pacific.

Was sound a design driver?

Yes — and unusually so. The architects tuned the layout so residents can hear the surf from inside the house. "The strategies of opposites — between closing and opening, heaviness and lightness, movement and pause — create a profound connection with the place, its intense light, its heavy rains, and the powerful sound of the waves of this place on the Mexican Pacific," they said.

How big is the footprint?

The published figures stop at the roof: 20 by 12 metres, longer than a city bus, enough to cover the ground-floor social wing in one uninterrupted sweep. The plot sits in a residential zone near the airport, a constraint Anonimous treated as a brief for privacy rather than isolation.

The brief, the architects said, was simple. Rest, pause, vegetation, sun, air, summer rain. Anonimous built the answer out of concrete, parota, palm and one very long roof. The next client asking for shade, breeze and surf will find this plan waiting in the files.