A sculptor's house, an architect's addition

The house started as a working place rather than a holiday one. Peter Ambrose lived here and made sculpture here, and the buildings took their shape from that: thick adobe walls, shaded courtyards, doors that open straight onto the garden, and rooms that were as much workspace as living space.

You can still read that logic walking through the compound. Nothing is arranged for display. Plinths, niches and wide thresholds are where they are because they were useful, and the art that sits in them now inherited spaces that were made for objects.

Garrick Ambrose, Peter's son and an architect, designed the later additions: clean white volumes set among the older brick and adobe, with large openings and a much quieter surface.

One generation built in adobe, the next in white concrete and glass. They share a garden.

The two idioms sit next to each other without arguing. The adobe is heavy, warm and hand-made; the modernist buildings are light and precise. Walking between them across the garden is one of the real pleasures of staying here, and it is why the compound reads as a family of buildings rather than a single house.

Art from Mexico and elsewhere is still central to the house. Pieces sit in the rooms people actually use, along the path to the pool, in the courtyards, and on the shelves you pass every day.

Guests tend to notice something on day three that they walked past twenty times on day one. You do not need to know anything about the work to enjoy staying here, but the house rewards attention in a way very few rental houses do.

Todos Santos has been a working town longer than it has been an art town: a mission founded in 1733, a sugar-mill era that built much of the historic centre, spring-fed farmland below the mesa. It became a Pueblo Mágico in 2006. Today, galleries and studios sit alongside that older working history.

Casa del Arte sits in Las Tunas, about ten minutes north of the centro. Built first by a sculptor and later expanded by his architect son, the house belongs to the same working tradition.