Casa Monterrey

To get in touch with Tadao Ando, the family who wanted him to design their house had to go through a contact at the Japanese embassy in Mexico City. The architect hesitated at first; the clients persisted and sent him a long letter. To reassure him, the owners also founded a building firm, Paralelo, to carry out all the concrete work, because, as one of them explains, no Mexican firm could reach the quality Ando would demand. Two specialists, Yukio Tanaka and Kohei Sugita, came from Japan to train the workers on site. Completed in 2011, the house is Ando's first residential work in Latin America.

At the heart of the house is a library two storeys high, set in a slim enclosure that crosses diagonally a quadrangle modelled on Mexican haciendas. It acts as the transition between two wings. On one side, the guest wing holds the front door, a gallery and a spare bedroom. On the other, the family wing gathers a kitchen open to the dining room, a living room, the master suite, the children's rooms, a gym and a wine cellar around two water-filled triangular courts.

The three-storey house digs into the hillside, which let the architect make horizontal and vertical concrete planes rise from the ground at various heights. One concrete wall is pierced by a wide rectangular opening turned toward the far-off mountains of the Sierra Las Mitras. The pool is 48 m long, 25 m of it for swimming; one part projects past the edge of the slope and looks down on the city. Exposed concrete covers the inside as well as the outside, and planting is woven into the design.

It is a private residence: it cannot be visited.