Mexico’s Hotel Básico is Designed with Recycled Petroleum Industry Materials

Designed by architecture firm <a href="http://www.centraldearquitectura.mx/en/Portfolio/Commercial/Basico-Hotel">Central de Arquitectura</a> and interior designer <a href="http://www.omelette.com.mx/">Héctor Galvan</a> , the 15-bedroom Hotel Básico in Playa del Carmen, Mexico breaks the norms of what one might typically associate with hotel design. Acknowledging the impact of the oil industry on the Caribbean region of Mexico, the designers built the hotel —right down to the rooftop swimming pools—from recycled industrial materials.

The concrete interiors of the rooms and the bathrooms added with clean modern lines from furnishing give a wonderful design aesthetics for guests to enjoy.

As Interior Designer Héctor Galvan put it, “[Hotel Básico’s] furniture and finishes are not new, novel additions to the world, but reconfigurations of that which exists”.

These bedrooms are outfitted with concrete walls, local tile floors, latex curtains (as a memory of the petroleum saturated history of the region) and intentionally exposed plumbing and electrical ducts.

Each room is similar but the decorations and interior furnishing are all a little different.

Located in Playa del Carmen in one corner of La Quinta Avenida, the main avenue of the city, Hotel Básico is a 1,600 square-meter, mixed-use building reflecting a Brutalism style through its bold use of concrete.

Truck fronts serve as cabanas with built-in mattresses, while the rest of the roof deck is covered in hammocks and recycled deck chairs.

Much like the pilotis that summarized the concept of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, the second floor is partially open exposing columns that support the third floor above.

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This area of the second floor provides hotel guests with an open-air lounge, and a few of the hotel’s bedrooms.

Guests enter through a spectacular lobby space that is 14 meters high and almost 18 meters long. It is here in the lobby area that the story of the design of the hotel begins to be exposed.

Four shops make up most of the ground floor, while 15 hotel rooms primarily reside on the second and third floors.