If you’re a certain kind of travel and style connoisseur, you’ve likely read about the Baja Club Hotel in La Paz, which opened last spring on Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. An architecture and design collaboration between Mexico City’s Max von Werz Arquitectos and Paris’s Jaune Architecture, the hotel’s mix of a turn-of-the-last-century style and Mexican artisanal traditions left both guests and critics impressed.
Earlier in the year, other stories touted the new Círculo Mexicano, a 25-room hotel located just to the north of Mexico City’s iconic cathedral in the heart of downtown. With that property, another Mexico City firm, Ambrosi | Etchegaray, breathed new life into the former home of famed photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Design firm La Metropolitana was responsible for the furniture, which combines a Mexican aesthetic and materials, from leather to tropical woods, with a certain Shaker-like simplicity.
These two projects and a number of other stylish hotels over the last 21 years have one aspect in common that may not be immediately apparent to guests—the hotel group responsible for creating them, Grupo Habita. In 2000, three brothers – Jaime, Moises, and Rafael Micha—and their partner Carlos Couturier decided to venture into the world of hospitality. All came to the business without hotel experience beyond being frequent travelers and knowing what they liked. They realized there were aspects of the design hotels then opening in Europe and elsewhere they had stayed in that they wanted to bring to their home, Mexico City. Along the way, the company has helped make the careers of a myriad of international architects and designers—Joseph Dirand, India Mahdavi, Dimore Studio—many of whom can now claim AD100 status.
These design minds often arrive to both Mexico and Grupo Habita with a similar sense of newness—they are often at the start of their careers, and it’s not unusual for an Habita hotel to be their first hospitality project. “This was our first project abroad and our first hospitality project,” says Paula Alvarez de Toledo of Jaune, one of the designers of Baja Club. “We had the chance to do this project with a hotel group that we loved very much.” Alvarez de Toledo reports that Jaune is now working on three additional hotel projects in France which she credits in part to the visibility of Baja Club.
In October 2000, when the group opened its first property—the Habita Hotel in Mexico City’s Polanco neighborhood—it was an immediate success. A glowing white box designed by Bernardo Gómez-Pimienta and Enrique Norten of Ten Arquitectos, the hotel and its rooftop pool became a landmark of Polanco just as the city was emerging as one the world’s premier art, culinary, and design capitals. The Micha brothers and Couturier had created a scene, a feat they would go on to repeat again and again.
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Today, Grupo Habita consists of 15 hotels: The Robey in Chicago, a total of five in Mexico City, and nine in other parts of Mexico. Although properties such as New York’s Hotel Americano and the Boca Chica Hotel in Acapulco are no longer affiliated with the group, they’ve also left their mark on the talents they employed.
Indeed, Boca Chica—which opened in 2010—was the group’s first collaboration with Frida Escobedo, one of Mexico’s most influential architects of the moment and the designer of London’s Serpentine Pavilion in 2018. “It was my first hospitality project and a great opportunity for a young architect,” she says. She is currently working on a 10-room hotel in a late 19th-century French-style townhouse in the colonial Mexican town of Puebla, which will be Grupo Habita’s second hotel in the city.
Rafael Micha, who has been the marketing force of the group helping land the properties in the pages of design and travel magazines, explains the formula of their success. Part of their winning formula comes down to the Spanish/Latin American concept of vecindad, which literally translates as “neighborhoodness,” though he uses the phrase more in the sense of creating a community or collection of appealing amenities.
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The hotels are not simply cool places to sleep, they are destinations where guests and residents alike come to party, eat, and experience the local culture. “The last year has shown us that a traveler can book any lodging, but they realize it’s all about the amenities. They want a rooftop terrace, they want to sit in a lobby with a mural by Manuel Rodríguez Lozano [found in the group's Downtown hotel]. Grupo Habita is about becoming a local upon arrival,” Micha explains.
He gives most of the credit for assembling the creative teams behind the projects to Carlos Couturier. “He is always looking for the next It architect,” Micha says. “We have managed to work with the very best of the best. Some were already established, like Ricardo Legorreta [who designed La Purificadora, the group’s first hotel in Puebla] but most were early in their careers.”
Among the latter, Micha cites India Mahdavi, who designed the interiors for the Condesa DF hotel in Mexico City. “She had no hotel experience except for the Townhouse Hotel Miami, but after Condesa, things exploded for her,” he says. The vibrant turquoise bar at the hotel remains one of the signature spaces by the designer called the Queen of Color by AD. “We have seen that same path with many people we have worked with,” Micha continues. “When Joseph Dirand designed Habita Monterrey [in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey], he was a young and very much under-the-radar, low-profile architect. Now he is one of the most sought-after architects of interiors in the world.”
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Dirand also credits much of his current success and projects with Four Seasons, Rosewood, and other hotel groups to his work with Habita. “For a city [Monterrey] that is not so international, we got a lot of attention for the project including winning the Wallpaper Design of the Year Award, in competition with big brands from around the world,” Dirand says.
“It was exciting,” he continues, reflecting on the Habita Monterrey project. “It was my first experience designing a hotel. Grupo Habita always put a lot of attention into design and trying to find a designer at an early stage of their career giving them the opportunity to do a relatively big project. I spent a lot of time in Mexico, traveling and looking for inspiration in the culture.”
Dirand is not the only collaborator who noted that their work with Habita provided a chance to explore Mexico’s rich design and architectural traditions. Britt Moran of Dimore Studio, the designers of Casa Habita in Guadalajara, says, “It was our first project in Mexico, and it meant not only exposure there, but also working with local craftspeople using traditional methods.” Moran continues, “We had a wonderful experience working with the Grupo Habita team—a great exchange of ideas and energy with an incredibly fun group of people.”
Though the pandemic has presented challenges and slowed some projects, Grupo Habita is moving ahead with others. In Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, on Mexico’s Pacific coast, the group just opened Hotel Terrestre, another property designed by Alberto Kalach. In Puebla, the group’s second hotel by architect Frida Escobedo will open in 2022. It will be located in a turn-of-the-century neoclassical mansion. “It only has 10 rooms, and that allowed us to propose a more elevated atmosphere—refined yet approachable and welcoming. The whole project was defined by a volcanic rock basin that was located in the courtyard,” Escobedo says. “We can’t wait for the project construction to be reactivated and see the final space come to life!”
