How the compound works

The compound is not a single house with a corridor of bedrooms. It is a group of buildings set behind a long wall, with gardens, courtyards and paths between them. You move between rooms by going outside, which sounds like a compromise until you have done it for a few days in this climate and realise it is the best thing about the place.

You move between rooms by going outside. After two days, that stops being a quirk and becomes the reason the house works.

It grew rather than being planned in one go: the older brick-and-adobe buildings first, the quieter modernist volumes added later. The result is a compound of parts from different moments, joined by walls, arcades and planting rather than by hallways.

Practically, that means the house has edges. There is a middle where everyone ends up, and there are corners where nobody will find you. Groups sort themselves into that geometry within about a day.

The gravitational centre of the compound is outdoors. The long table under the pergola beside the open-air kitchen is where most of the day's meals happen, and where people keep sitting long after the plates are cleared. The pool terrace does the middle of the day. The courtyards do the in-between hours.

Indoors, the living spaces work the same way — furniture arranged for conversation rather than for a television, with art in the room and doors that stay open onto the garden. It is easy to have eight people in a house like this without anyone feeling crowded, because nobody is competing for the same square metres at the same time.

If your group cooks, the outdoor kitchen and the long table are the reason to build at least a couple of nights around eating here rather than going out.

There are four bedrooms, and they are distributed across the buildings rather than lined up along a hall. That distance is the feature. People keep different hours on holiday — the early swimmer, the person who reads until two, the couple who want their coffee in silence — and this house absorbs that without negotiation.

Beyond the bedrooms, the compound is full of places to be alone for an hour: a shaded corner of a courtyard, a chair in the garden, a room with a door you can close while the rest of the group is at the pool. On a long stay with a group, that matters more than almost anything else on a listing.

It also means the house suits a mixed group. Two families, or three couples, or a set of friends of very different temperaments, are not forced into a single rhythm.

The outdoor space is not a yard attached to a house — it is the connective tissue of the whole compound. Gardens and planted courtyards sit between the buildings, with palms overhead and brick and stone underfoot, and the saltwater pool at the centre of the daytime.

The day tends to move around the shade. Mornings are for the courtyard that catches the early light, the middle of the day belongs to the pool and whatever is covered, and the late afternoon opens the whole compound back up as the walls go warm and the light comes in low.

This is also why the house handles a hot week better than its footprint suggests. There is always somewhere cooler to move to.

Casa del Arte began as the home and studio of the sculptor Peter Ambrose. The modernist additions came later, designed by his son, the architect Garrick Ambrose. Art from Mexico and further afield is throughout the compound.

It is not hung as a gallery. Pieces sit in the rooms people use — on plinths, in niches, in the passageways you walk through on the way to the pool — so you meet the work in passing rather than in a viewing. Guests tend to notice something new on day three that they walked past twenty times on day one.

You do not need to know anything about it to enjoy staying here. But if you do care about art and building, the house rewards attention in a way that very few rental houses do.

Morning. The early risers take coffee to whichever courtyard has the light, and somebody swims before the water has warmed up. This is the productive part of the day, if there is one — a walk into town, the market run, the drive to the coast.

Afternoon. Nobody does anything. The heat pushes everyone toward the pool and the shade, lunch is long and assembled rather than cooked, and the house goes quiet for a couple of hours because half the group is asleep and the other half is reading.

Evening. The compound reopens. Cooking starts at the outdoor kitchen, people drift back to the long table, and dinner takes as long as it takes. Afterwards it is the courtyards, the pool at night, and music — and whoever wants to go to bed simply walks across the garden to a different building and does.

A group that wants to be together but not on top of one another. People who will cook at least a few nights. Anyone who would rather stay in one remarkable place for a week than move between three ordinary ones.

It is a compound, an older one in places, with outdoor circulation and a garden that is genuinely a garden. That is exactly what makes it good, and it is worth knowing that in advance rather than expecting a single sealed modern villa.