Mexican-Iranian architect Yashar Yektajo, in close collaboration with Mexican-Canadian chef and owner Ernesto Kut Gomez, has transformed a 35-year-abandoned sugarcane hacienda in the coastal Baja town of Todos Santos into Casa Melina — a hybrid guesthouse conceived as a cultural refuge. The project evokes the precolonial memory of the displaced Indigenous Guaycura people through a brutalist-informed architectural language of raw concrete, exposed textures and earthy materiality that resonates with the surrounding desert landscape.
On the Pacific edge of Baja California Sur, where the desert dissolves into salt air and geography oscillates between aridity and abundance, Todos Santos persists as a paradoxical settlement: a former sugarcane enclave transformed into an international destination of surf culture, artistic migration, and boutique hospitality. Beneath its picturesque surface, however, lies a more difficult historical sedimentation — one marked by colonial extraction, missionary expansion, and the gradual erasure of Indigenous life.
It is within this layered territory that Casa Melina positions itself less as a restoration project and more as an architectural act of mnemonic recovery.
Named after María Ignacia Melina of Loreto — remembered as one of the last known individuals identifying with the Indigenous Guaycura people, who inhabited the coasts and mountains of Baja California Sur for millennia — the project inhabits the challenging threshold between preservation and reinvention. The Baja California peninsula was once home to two First Nations that disappeared in the early twentieth century: the Guaycura and the Pericú. Expert gatherers, navigators, fishers, and observers of celestial patterns, they shaped the peninsula long before European contact.
“Hers is the face of a nation in extinction, so even though the property is representative of a colonial industry I wanted to name the house in her honor,” explains the owner Ernesto Kut Gomez.
The original nineteenth-century hacienda — constructed during the prosperity generated by sugarcane exports — carried within its walls the material evidence of a colonial economy dependent upon both land exploitation and the displacement of native populations.
Rather than neutralizing this history beneath the polished language of contemporary hospitality, Casa Melina attempts to spatialize absence itself.
The Guaycura Indigenous people were progressively decimated through Jesuit missionization, disease, forced conversion, and territorial dispossession during the colonial period. Their disappearance from official historical consciousness exemplifies what anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot described as the “silencing” embedded within the production of history itself: the systematic process through which power determines not only what becomes historical narrative, but also what is erased, marginalized, or rendered unarchivable altogether.
In Casa Melina, memory emerges as an integral layer of the architectural terrain, reinscribing political presence into the town’s spatial and symbolic fabric.
Casa Melina’s story starts seven years ago when chef Ernesto Kut Gomez — a dedicated food historian working directly with Indigenous growers in remote regions of Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Tabasco — encountered the abandoned structure while visiting Todos Santos. Roofless and partially ruined, the building appeared suspended between collapse and persistence.
His intention, however, extended beyond private restoration. Together with architect Yashar Yektajo, founder of Yektajo Architects, Kut Gomez envisioned a space capable of hosting artists, chefs, musicians, and temporary communities — a cultural refuge embedded within the fragile urban fabric of the historic center.
“I wanted to live in the building’s draft. I spent two months camping there. Walking around the space and imagining what it would become,” explains Ernesto Kut Gomez.
The intervention resists the spectacle often associated with adaptive reuse in tourist economies.
Instead, Yektajo Architects adopt an almost archaeological approach toward materiality. Layers of impermeable plaster were removed from the original brick walls to allow humidity to escape and the structure to breathe again. The exposed heritage masonry was subsequently whitewashed, not to conceal age but to unify temporal fragments into a singular atmospheric field. Electrical conduits remain visible; plumbing disappears discreetly beneath newly inserted floors.
The project embraces incompletion and exposure simultaneously as aesthetic language and ethical position.
Yet Casa Melina’s most striking gesture emerges at the western edge of the courtyard: a nine-meter-high tower cast in brown concrete. Constrained by strict local preservation regulations that prohibited horizontal expansion, the architects responded vertically, producing a monolithic volume that feels at once ancient and radically contemporary.
Its earthy chromatic presence echoes the surrounding desert terrain, as though the structure had been excavated rather than constructed.
The tower operates spatially as a sequence of framed inhabitation. At ground level, a submerged bedroom dissolves into the adjacent pool, giving the impression of “dwelling inside the water,” as the architect describes it.
Above, private quarters ascend toward a public mirador — an elevated observation deck where four identical apertures frame fragments of Todos Santos like calibrated cinematic stills. At the rooftop, the Pacific Ocean finally appears: a horizon historically concealed by the dense urban grain of the historic center. Habitation rises through the brutalist-inspired tower as a continuous vertical sequence, where movement becomes an act of reading the territory — its urban traces, geological strata, historical residues and symbolic dimensions.
If contemporary hospitality architecture frequently aestheticizes locality while evacuating political memory, Casa Melina attempts a more critical position. Sleeping and eating — the two central programs of the house — acquire anthropological resonance. The kitchens, meticulously designed by Ernesto Kut Gomez, operate as sites of cultural exchange, translating hospitality not as mere consumption but as a collective practice of gathering, transmission, and learning.
“I’m dedicated to using food as a means to communicate ancestral knowledge back to our cities,” states Gomez.
Through its intensified engagement with topography, material tactility, and cultural presence, Casa Melina extends toward what decolonial theorist Walter D. Mignolo terms “border thinking” — a form of knowledge emerging from the geopolitical and cultural margins produced by colonial modernity itself. Rather than reproducing universalized architectural narratives, border thinking operates from positions historically excluded from dominant systems of representation.
In Casa Melina, architecture operates as a threshold condition: neither fully vernacular nor wholly contemporary, neither rupture nor reconstruction, but a spatial negotiation between colonial inheritance and suppressed Indigenous memory.
Here, restoration is not an aesthetic rehabilitation but a confrontation with historical discontinuity. Through exposed brick, raw concrete, shadow, light, and framed horizons, Yektajo Architects construct an architecture that acknowledges simultaneously what remains and what has been erased.
The result is a guesthouse conceived as a spatial palimpsest where precolonial memory quietly persists beneath the surfaces of contemporary life.
Facts & Credits
Project title Casa Melina
Typology Reuse, Restoration, Renovation, Extension, Hospitality
Location Todos Santos, BCS, México
Status Completed, 2023
Architecture Yashar Yektajo, Yektajo Architects
Concept & Kitchen Design Ernesto Kut Gómez
Custom furniture design Ellen Odegaard & Ernesto Kut Gómez
Photography Rafael Gamo, Ernesto Kut Gómez
Photo Styling Tami Christiansen
References
Trouillot, M.-R. (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.
Mignolo, W.D. (2011) The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.