La Higuera

Follow the sign on the road along Manzanillo Bay, climb a driveway that makes you lean forward, and a striking cube appears to hang from the hillside. That’s La Higuera, named for the strangler fig clinging to the rock beside it, its roots gripping the stone in thick, twisting lines.

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Scottish owners Louise and John Martin first saw this land by crawling up it. They loved the view anyway. Louise’s one fixed instruction to the builder was “a cube within a cube.” Carlos Desormaux of S-Mart Home in Zihuatanejo built it, and the hill decided the rest.

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Inside, one open space holds the kitchen, living and dining areas, spilling onto a terrace that wraps two sides of the house. Manzanillo Bay stretches one way, the coast toward Saladita the other. A long reflecting pool runs beside it, with an oak tree rising straight through the water and the deck. Upstairs, two quiet bedrooms. Up a narrow staircase, a lounging nook for stargazing, and above it, a small pool in the sky. “It’s not a big pool,” says Louise. “But it’s enough.”

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Casa Manantial, a Troncones design studio, filled the rooms with handmade Mexican pieces. A seven-foot marquetry surfboard by Welsh artist Emma Wood hangs above the stairs. More than three-quarters of the land is still native forest. Pelicans and vultures pass at eye level, and the whole place feels suspended between the trees and the sky.

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Come for the view. Stay for the pool in the sky.