A Place of Passage
Before the inspiration, or my journey into the unknown, there was always first the mountain. Sixteen million years ago, when the volcano Palo Huérfano was still active, it carved river systems, giving form to the land — an ancient mother of the valleys and plains that surround it. Its peaks stand as towering sentinels, a defining presence on the horizon of San Miguel. For millennia, this land has been a place of passage. Mammoths and saber-toothed cats once crossed it; their fossils still surface in the rock. On the western slopes, in caves reached only on horseback, petroglyphs carved by ancient Mesoamericans still mark the stone. Today, the mountain remains alive in the same rhythm: red-tailed hawks turning in the thermals, mountain lions moving across the higher ground, and each autumn, in one of the greatest animal migrations on Earth, monarch butterflies passing through on their way south.
I arrived to this place late, as a stranger in my mid-twenties. Standing on its slopes for the first time, I understood something before I could have argued for it: whatever I made here would be a theatre for nature. A place from which one could watch the mountain breathe — light moving across the ridgelines, curtains of rain falling over the Sierra, and the seasons moving across the landscape in waves of colour. The question was never how to build upon the landscape — only how to belong to it.
A Bend in the River
I came to Mexico in the way one sometimes leaves a life without quite understanding why — an instinct that there was a bend in the river of my life I needed to follow. Not long after arriving, my ex-husband Jorge and I spent a night in a tiny house on the coast of Puerto Escondido. As darkness settled over the Pacific, we watched a storm unfold far out at sea, lightning dancing in the distance. Something took hold of me there. I became consumed by the idea of building a house in nature — not as an object to be admired, but as a vessel through which nature itself could be experienced and shared. I had no training in architecture or design, but I had a conviction that I had to follow this idea into existence.
There is a particular fear in beginning something you do not yet know how to do. But with Jorge by my side, I began to understand that the unknown is less a thing to fear than the place where things begin. That if you quiet yourself enough to listen, the next step tends to reveal itself.
The Weight of Light
The idea that gave the houses their shape came from Luis Barragán — what he and the sculptor Mathias Goeritz called “emotional architecture”: the belief that a building should move you rather than merely house you. I knew early on that I wanted the structure to play with light, scale, and movement. Light became a structural element of the design, and so glass and mirror became the natural instruments of the vision. What followed were two houses built around two ideas — Reflection and Perception.
Etérea N°1 was built around reflection, and like the nature it returns to you, the house is never fixed — always becoming, transforming with the changing light and the seasons. The illusion blurs the line between where the observer ends and the landscape begins.
Etérea N°2 was built around perception. Where the first turns you toward your own reflection, this one turns your gaze through it — open on every side, settling on no single view but holding many at once. Etérea N°2 is about seeing through the horizons of a life, all of them present together, none of them final. Both, finally, are architecture that turns you inward, each along its own axis — and both, visually and functionally, touch on something nearer to site-specific installation than to building: volumes that seem to dissolve into their surroundings rather than assert themselves against them. The name holds the same intention. Etérea, from the Spanish for ethereal, suggests something nebulous and otherworldly.
What the Mountain Makes
Bringing the houses into being meant starting from nothing. The site had no road, water, power or infrastructure of any kind. The access road had to be cut before anything else could begin, and from there the houses were made to provide their own. The constraint became the method: to build here at all meant building self-sufficient. Both houses are entirely off-grid, powered by solar energy alone, their roofs shaped to harvest and conserve the rainwater they run on.
Even the foundations came from the mountain — laid entirely from volcanic rock gathered by hand across the site, so that, in a literal sense, the mountain gave rise to what now stands upon it. Palo Huérfano sits on a wildlife corridor of rare biodiversity, and a mirrored building set across it poses a real risk to the migratory birds that cross each season. To prevent bird strikes, the façades carry a patterned ultraviolet coating — invisible to the human eye, but clear to a bird in flight. Conservation, built into the glass itself.
And none of it was made alone. Every neighbour on this mountain has had a hand in it — the rancheros, the guides, the families who have lived here for generations. The experiences offered to guests — the rides, the hikes, the dinners — are run independently by local families, and the income from them stays entirely with the community. The work has flowed the other way too: roads and infrastructure built for the houses that serve the wider area long after construction was done. On a corridor like this, to build responsibly was always going to mean building together, and leaving the greater part of the land exactly as it was found. Sustainability was never added on. It was simply what followed, once the landscape came first.
The Way Appears
I launched this project into the public sphere in the middle of the pandemic. On my last day living on the mountain, before the first guests arrived, I returned home from a hike and the house came into view from across the ravine — a momentary angular deformation on the horizon, quickly disappearing like a passing shadow with the changing light.
I continued on, entering down a cutting, across a field, and up through the sloped entrance where the mountainside became the front door.
Over the years of building here, and living through the turning seasons of the mountain, I began to see my own life differently — no longer as a succession of good and difficult days, but as one continuous turning, in which each season belongs to the same whole. And through it all, I’ve found a deeper trust in the timing of my life, and an appreciation for the great poetry in our often complicated, non-linear journeys.
To borrow the ageless words of Rumi: “As you start to walk out on the way, the way appears.”
And perhaps the process of becoming is really just that simple.
Prashant Ashoka Founder, Casa Etérea