Inside an Oceanside Mexico Vacation Villa Devoted to Indoor-Outdoor Living

When a Los Angeles family was looking for a place to build a beachfront vacation villa, they found themselves drawn to Chileno Bay, in Mexico, at the southern tip of Baja California in Cabo San Lucas. The four members of the family—a couple and their two grown children—all work in real estate and fashion and the children had been to Baja many times on holidays with friends. The Chileno Bay development where they found their dream vacation spot is organized around a golf course, restaurant, and clubhouse. The house sits next to the clubhouse and faces a rare swimmable beach in Cabo, which is known for its treacherous surf.

The mission which Jordan Sholem and Jessica Katz, the decorators and cofounders of J2 Interiors, chose to accept was to create a spacious and comfortable vacation home. “The owners wanted the house to be integrated into this beautiful coastal landscape, creating a synergy between indoor and outdoor spaces with a harmonious blend of modern aesthetics and natural materials. They also requested a coffee table for the living room that would be large and solid enough for them to dance on it, as they love to drink tequila and party!” the two decorators say with a laugh.

The first challenge facing J2 Interiors was to source or design furniture that could hold its own with the home’s 13-foot-high ceilings and fill rooms and spaces with vast dimensions. The curtains and window treatments required dozens of meters of fabric. The coffee table built to support dancing revelers in the living room measures six and a half feet by six and a half feet. It, too, was designed with the immense scale of the living room in mind.

The way the architecture of the house plays with light is among its most striking features. The architects from Ogarrio Zapata Arquitectos created a cantilevered staircase in the center of the large reception patio that allows light to pass between each step in one of the house’s many dramatic aesthetic gestures. From the spectacular entrance, with its large water mirror to the view of the sea through the vast living room, the space is entirely open to the outside thanks to windows that disappear entirely into the thickness of the walls. The house is a series of visually powerful scenes, another is found on the first-floor outdoor terrace with its six-foot square fireplace. The large oversized bench with soft seats and cushions is ideal for lounging under the stars and facing the sea “with a glass of tequila in hand.”