Riad San Cristóbal: A Happy Accident

Muriel Blandings: I want it to be a soft green, not as blue-green as a robin’s egg, but not as yellow-green as daffodil buds. Now, the only sample I could get is a little too yellow, but don't let whoever does it go to the other extreme and get it too blue. It should just be a sort of grayish-yellow-green. Now, the dining room. I’d like yellow. Not just yellow; a very gay yellow. Something bright and sunshine-y. Now, this is the paper we're going to use in the hall. It’s flowered, but I don't want the ceiling to match any of the colors of the flowers. There's some little dots in the background, and it’s these dots I want you to match. Not the little greenish dot near the hollyhock leaf, but the little bluish dot between the rosebud and the delphinium blossom. Is that clear? Now the kitchen is to be white. Not a cold, antiseptic hospital white. A little warmer, but still, not to suggest any other color but white. Now for the powder room. I want you to match this thread, and don’t lose it. It's the only spool I have and I had an awful time finding it! As you can see, it’s practically an apple red. Somewhere between a healthy winesap and an unripened jonagold.

Mr. PeDelford, Builder: You got that Charlie?

Charlie, Painter: Red, green, blue, yellow, white.

Mr. PeDelford: Check.

That’s a bit of dialogue from the 1948 Cary Grant/Myrna Loy film Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, Muriel Blandings telling the contractors what color paint she wants in each room. That sort of conversation happens frequently in building a new house or carrying out a renovation, the client expressing their heart’s desire and the contractors wanting to do what they’ve always done. It takes compromise, patience and understanding to get the client into their home and the contractor out, with both parties feeling good about the process.

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MEET CHRISTINE

At Riad San Cristóbal in Troncones, the client, long-time Hollywood costume designer Christine Peters, had more of a sense of what she wanted than she had a specific vision. She knew she wanted a one-bedroom house, with a large open area encompassing her kitchen/dining/living rooms, that stepped down to a pool terrace. Given the property’s location on a hill above the Pacific, she wanted to make the most of mountain breeze and the sunset views. She did have a sense of the colors and finishes, and she’d created a hillside sanctuary before, but never in Mexico. From the time she found Troncones, she knew this is where she needed to be.

In describing her first trip to here, Christine said, “It was an emergency get-out-of-LA trip, between jobs, in 2004. The movie Shawshank Redemption was still buzzing around everybody’s head so Zihua was on everybody’s radar. I found a place to stay, got there and hated it. I couldn't believe I was stuck in this horrible place. It was July; it was hot, and I’m thinking, ‘I gotta get out of here.’ Thankfully, I’d booked part of my trip in Troncones and I was like, ‘Oh, God, please make this be better because I can't go into this next job feeling like I need a vacation from my vacation.’ So, with great trepidation, I rented a Jeep and drove from Zihua out to Troncones, which back then was a journey. There was no highway. You went through every little town, you bumped over every tope, you dodged every chicken, every donkey, every stray dog, every person selling something in the middle of the street. It took more than an hour to get out here.”

None of that turned her off though, in fact, it gave her an appreciation for the remoteness and isolation of Troncones, especially when she arrived at her rental, Casa Colorida, Anne Merritt’s house. Christine remembers, “We pulled up alongside this big wall painted Schiaparelli pink—a vibrant, hot pink—and came to some massive gates. We opened them up, and, WOW, it was like music came in—–WAAAAH—here-you-are. It was amazing. Viva México. I got out, settled in, met everyone at El Burro Borracho, the cast of characters there—Vladimir and Belisario—and went off to Majahua later. I was enchanted and completely hooked. I loved it. I loved that it rained every day. I loved the orange crabs running through the house. It was just magical. Troncones became a regular place to visit.”

In time, Christine became drawn to Lo Sereno, a beachside hotel known for its brutalist style and its sensual elegance—barefoot luxury—all novelties in Troncones when Lo Sereno opened in 2017. Owner Rafael Sainz Skewes had a small boutique in the lobby and it soon became Christine’s after she pointed out to there was nothing in the store she couldn’t find cheaper in Zihua. Rafael asked what Christine would do there, and she responded, “Look at you. You’re running around in denim pearl-snap shirts. You should do things like that, men’s vintage clothing. The store became like a pop-up thing, where I’d bring a duffel bag full of stuff, vintage clothes, perfect for vacation, perfect for men and women. People bought things and really enjoyed it. I had fun with it, too.”

By then, Christine had become close with Rafael’s son Nicolas, an architect, who she first met by Instagram. As Christine recalls, “Nicolas started following a vintage clothing page I have. We were already friends when we were down here one year at the same time, and finally met in person. We started talking about architecture, because by then I’d already decided I was going to buy a lot and build something different. It turns out we had a lot of architectural references in common. I’m a big fan of [Mexican architect] Luis Barragán and we both liked [American architect] Frank Lloyd Wright. Nicolas understood concrete construction, which is something you don’t see in the States very much. I was really impressed with him.”

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THE HOUSE

The decision to purchase the property was aided by COVID-19, but the search began before the pandemic, Christine saying she looked at the property for the first time in 2019. She remembers, “I really wasn’t ready to buy anything, but I started looking at hill lots. I like living on a hill. I did that in L.A.; in San Francisco I lived under Coit Tower on the Filbert Steps; in Twentynine Palms, near Joshua Tree, I lived on one of the few hills in that part of the desert. Hillside living comes natural to me. I love being down at the beach but at the end of the day, it’s not what I want. I wanted a hilltop retreat. I looked around Majahua; I looked south of Troncones, above Bajito Bay. But I came back to this one in 2021.”

By then, Christine had decided that L.A. life was not for her anymore. 25 years in the film industry and 10 years in city government, coupled with the crazy worries of the pandemic, led her to look where she started, up behind Ernestina’s store. Sitting in her living room, on furniture she’s designed and had custom-built, Christine said, “What was really special to me were the trees. There were a lot of trees, a lot of native plants. I felt like I was in the jungle, which is important to me because I am a gardener. I didn’t want to have forced tropical landscaping. This lot gave me plenty to work with. And it had breezes, from the jungle behind and up from ocean.”

Looking back at her process, Christine said, “I was very clear about what I wanted for this living space. It needed to be a place where I could cook and talk to my friends, where people could sit anywhere in the room and we could all still make eye contact, unless somebody wanted to go jump in the pool. I didn’t have a pool in LA. That was another priority and so were high ceilings, which I love in a climate like this because the heat can go up [said while she pointed up at the 24 narrow vertical windows that add visual interest and serve as vents] and the air can come in. This room is not designed to have air conditioning, as long as the air is moving and the fans are functioning, you don’t need it.”

Christine continued, “I also wanted a one-bedroom house. I didn’t want to build a vacation home. I wasn't building a villa. This wasn’t something to be rented out. I was building a house to live in, for me. The property is two lots; it could have additional buildings but, right now, it has this house and one bungalow, which is the garage, with an apartment over it. That’s where I lived for six months while we finished the construction.”

From there the conversation led us into a review of the process of construction and finding finishes, both of which are as non-linear as an X-Files episode, a show Christine worked on. Trips to Mérida in the Yucatán, back to L.A. and loads of online research led Christine to source various looks, but most of what she came to use was found locally. Some of it, like the pool tiles, came somewhat by accident, Christine saying, “I’d gone to every single place; I’d looked at every website online; I went to everyone who was supposed to know anything about pools. I couldn’t get the blue look I wanted. One day I went into Interceramic to buy a toilet and I walked into Mundo Venezia, next door, thinking, ‘I haven't gone in here’. There was a guy there whose name was Peter, not Pedro. Peter. He was repping this tile product, Togama, from Spain. I showed him a picture of what I wanted and he was like, ‘Oh, you want this.’ And he pulled out a sample page and said, ‘This is the color you want. It's called Arena, and if you make your pool five feet deep, it's going to look like your color.’ Well, my pool is five feet deep and, with those sand-colored tiles, it always looks blue.”

Christine wanted a farmhouse tile floor in her main room which also proved to require some research and some luck. She described her process, “I found a vendor in Portugal who did limestone tiles and shipped them to Mexico, but ultimately went with cantera, a volcanic rock, from Panjosa, a good company in Zapopan, near Guadalajara, in [the state of] Jalisco. They cut the cantera to size I wanted and delivered it. I didn’t know we could get it to come like that; it made the installation easier. The best thing is cantera is porous, but it’s also got a grit to it, so it’s not slippery like smooth concrete. It’s really nice around the pool. I picked white and I was worried that I would have a lot of problems with dirt and stains, but it’s been remarkably easy to keep clean.”

When it came to the color of the pasta, the smooth concrete finish used on the exterior and interior walls, Christine did have a specific color in mind—a “pink salmon-y desert tan”. The house has that now, but getting there was far from the simplicity of installing cut tiles. “Nicolas and I had a million pictures in our storyboards, our inspiration boards. El pastero, the maestro of the pasta, kept making samples for me, but they were everything but what I wanted. That went on and on. For a while, I thought he was color-blind. I finally gave up. I went safe and picked a beige. This was right before I moved down here permanently so I was still going back and forth once a month, twice a month. I figured before we do anything on the main house, let’s pasta the bungalow so that if it’s a horrible mistake, we can make changes on the house.

When I came back, drove up the hill and went around the bend, I saw the pasta on the bungalow for the first time, and I was shocked. It was exactly the color I’d always wanted there, but had switched from. Now I could see, while I’m looking up the hill at my house, that it’s actually the wrong color for the house, but it’s the perfect color for the bungalow, because the bungalow is always going to be in shade and surrounded by jungle trees and greens while the house is going to be in the sun most of the time. It was an absolutely gorgeous color on the bungalow. Once we had that, the pastero knew exactly how to get to the pink I was after. How does that happen? It felt like we came on that by some happy accident.”

That wasn’t the only one. When it came to the wood in the house, Christine had been talked into parota, a hardwood frequently used in Troncones because it’s resistant to everything tropical, including bugs, sun and rain. She had a closet door made, but Christine felt, “It didn’t give me the finish I wanted. It didn’t work. Meanwhile, I’d asked the guys to make some temporary railings for me, out of the wood they’d been using to make their concrete forms. It was pine, all weathered and covered in concrete. When I saw those in place, it clicked. ‘That’s what I want to use.’ I’d already paid for it; I had a ton of it laying around, so I asked the carpenters to make a cabinet for me. Once they did that first one, I saw it was perfect. We canceled the order for the parota and started gathering up all the wood we had left over, and making things out of it. People told me bugs would get in and break down the wood, but the carpenters assured me nothing like that would happen, that the boards were so covered in concrete from so many years of being used over and over that nothing could get in. Year two, going on three. So far, so good.”

There was a stool made from the construction pine that, by then, had become Christine’s pet, the place she put her bag, the place she sat to think. She still has it. She’s still making things in that style, for her pool deck and for her vintage clothing store next to Delizia, La Vida Riad San Cristóbal. As Christine explains it, “I had the good fortune of meeting Sebastian Obermayer, who lives in Majahua. He loved the idea of my using recycled material. He started coming up here and assembling planks and pieces. I started making sketches of what I wanted. He’d come back with a more engineered sketch and soon I’d have it, a chair, a love seat, all beautiful. He and his fiancé, Mona Drescher, helped me set up the store. It has a similar look to my house, with a longer name. I put la vida on the store because it has a little bit of everything—vintage clothes, vintage mirrors and paintings—stuff people can use in their life, and not just here.”

Riad San Cristóbal is a nod to the Moroccan, Mediterranean and Mexican influences Christine found making themselves known in her house. Another happy accident. “I didn’t set out to be the United Nations of boho beach chic,” she said, “but here we are. It’s very much a riad [an Arabic word for garden] and the San Cristóbal is a nod to my patron saint, St. Christopher. I was guaranteed to be a boy, then I wasn’t, so I was named Christine. My mom gave me an amulet of St. Christopher, a charm that I always carry with me, and I often sew St. Christopher medals into the clothes I make.”

So, all this work, all these happy accidents. What did she learn? That answer came easy, Christine musing, “I learned a lot from my mistakes and I think the best thing that I can do is acknowledge the fact the mistakes are mine. I accept 100% responsibility for my failings, whether it was not vetting the people I hired enough or not trusting very much in the people I had. But, I think, the most important thing any new builder here can do is to know their own capacity to manage what’s happening. I knew I needed to move down here, that I couldn’t continue with monthly visits.

Only if you can 100% embrace your plans and your renderings, and you’re not a control freak and you’re not somebody who’s into details, then maybe you can let somebody work everything through and send you pictures; you show up and you move into your house. To me, that’s not realistic. Everything is literally in concrete, and breaking concrete is not an easy thing. We’re not talking about wood framing. There’s no drywall here. You can’t just poke a hole to fix that pipe or to fix that electrical wiring. And the making and the breaking here is at your expense, not the contractor’s. It’s a lot better to be here.”