From steel-framed windows, Manolo Mestre’s office overlooks the tree-filled Plaza Rio de Janeiro, a public park in the fashionable Colonia Roma Norte district near the historic heart of Mexico City. Here, the plaza’s central fountain, with its version of Michelangelo’s David emerging giant, bronze and naked from dense sprays of water, is surrounded by children, stray dogs, tourists and street vendors. Manolo, a successful and very popular architect, moved here from the more sedate Lomas district eight years ago, drawn by the area’s celebrated café life and its proximity to the city centre. Charming and handsome, and seemingly always on the road, Manolo is a familiar figure in the cultural and social life of Mexico, frequently attending art museums and galleries with his clients.
The architect occupies two apartments in the same building, both full to bursting with his collections of mainly Latin American art and sculpture. One, lower down in the building, functions as his office, while he lives in the other; eight floors up, his living space is accessible only by stairs, since the elevator was disabled by an earthquake a year or two ago. Getting up and down them, he tells me, is his principal form of exercise.
Manolo has been collecting obsessively since his idyllic childhood in rural Mexico. One of 12 children, he grew up amid his family’s sugar plantations. There were ruined haciendas on the property to be explored, including one built on top of a pyramid. Manolo, however, preferred to be with the adults indoors. ‘I was the one who always wanted to know more, thrilled to be at the table with the grown-ups, listening to their politics, their histories and [that of] my family’s Pre-Columbian art inheritance. Then, on Sundays, we all sat around the radio for the weekly bullfight program.’ His was a notable clan: in 1867 Manolo’s great-grandfather, who would become the governor of Puebla, fought against the Maximilian-led French occupation as part of the struggle that restored Mexico once again as an independent republic.
‘I always knew I was going to be an architect,’ says Manolo. ‘As a child I constructed three-storey houses from cushions on the living-room floor, already creating spaces. Also, I had an uncle, Hector Mestre, who was a famous architect and very glamorous. He had a red-and-white Cadillac and a beautiful house in Acapulco. I wanted to have his life.’ Successful in college, Manolo designed his first house at the age of 20, and his legion of attractive vernacular-style villas with a contemporary twist now dot the coastlines of Mexico from Careyes to Merida.
Manolo was already collecting Pre-Columbian artefacts in his childhood: ‘I would go into the plantations after the rains with the ground wet and pick up newly exposed pieces,’ he says. It’s a facility for finding that he’s never lost. Years ago, I was driving with Manolo on a track between ongoing projects around Valle de Bravo, in the mountains near Mexico City. While passing a cutting in the cliff he suddenly stopped the car; he had spotted an area of exposed charcoal. Sensing this to be the remnants of a possible ancient encampment, he walked over and pulled out a small object. It was a tiny Pre-Columbian vessel. Manolo’s collections have been enhanced over the years since instructing his workmen to hand him any such relics unearthed on his job-sites.
Manolo’s architectural practice, however, has remained fixed in the contemporary: he has a busy career specialising in luxury tropical-style villas, often for international clients. In 1982 he designed Blancaneaux Lodge, Francis Ford Coppola’s mountain hideaway resort in Belize, as well as another resort for the film-maker on the Caribbean coast.
His Instagram followers might grow weary of seeing another perfect sunset, fringed by palm trees and coastline, snapped as Manolo relaxes on site after another day spent with contractors and clients, but the architect seldom rests on his laurels. He loves visiting artists’ studios, and as his career has evolved his enthusiasms have broadened to encompass contemporary art. In recent years, clients have accompanied him to art fairs and helped with potential purchases – spanning works from classic Mexican Modernists like Rufino Tamayo, later 20th-century artists like Francisco Toledo, and contemporaries such as Ugo Rondinone, Olafur Eliasson and his late friend, the painter James Brown – many of which he has now added to his own collections.
In Manolo’s two apartments overlooking the plaza, museum-quality Pre-Columbian pieces inherited from his family and his own collection of religious and contemporary art – 40 years in the making – come together in successful and singular configurations. Relics sit beside modern art; objects and works from his far-flung travels share space with furniture designs of his own. As the gregarious man himself puts it, they all ‘form a dialogue together’.
For more information about Manolo Mestre, visit Instagram @manolo.mestre
