Casa Todos Juntos

Casa Todos Juntos means All Together, and the house was built around exactly that idea. It stands in Bolongo, inside the gated peninsula of Punta Mita on the Riviera Nayarit, and it is unmistakably Mexican in its design: honest materials, deep shade, rooms that open rather than close.

Seven bedrooms and an additional room, eight bathrooms, fourteen guests. The living spaces are generous enough that a group this size never has to negotiate for somewhere to sit. There are terraces on more than one side of the house, which turns out to matter. The family that wakes early takes one, the readers take another, and the last conversation of the night finds its own.

The gourmet kitchen is the center of it. Large groups cook, and this house expects them to. Mornings begin in ones and twos and slowly become everyone. The private pool does most of the work of the afternoon, and nobody has to be anywhere. Children stay in the water until someone remembers lunch. The day ends where it started, at the table, with more people around it than when it began.

Punta Mita supplies the rest. It is a gated peninsula on Mexico's Pacific coast, with the Islas Marietas offshore in their UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and humpback whales moving along the coast from November to March. The LuxMex concierge team can arrange in villa service and excursions on the days the group decides it wants a plan.

Air conditioning and high-speed WiFi are here, of course. The real amenity is that the house holds everyone at once.