Kappner Clark is rarely exactly the one you immediately believe when you stereotype a C-suite marketing executive for one of the top publicly traded real estate development companies in Mexico, or an American expat south of the border.
Flexible, 32 years old and with a soft voice, with hands almost intertwined in front of her as European heads of state like Angela Merkel do to convey balance and respect, her Spanish is already perfectly fluent after 10 years of paintings in Cabo and Mexico City. . , even though he grew up in Denver.
When you make her talk about the mechanics of real estate, she calculates and reports herself in a way that challenges her relative youth but belies her deep enjoyment in an industry that is ruled by older men.
When she talks about One
When I recently discovered myself in Mexico’s Riviera Nayarit, just north of Puerto Vallarta, I’m with Clark through an infinity pool 450 feet above the Pacific Ocean with a dozen miles of virgin jungle and abandoned beaches narrowing north and south of me, I also found myself unable to get involved.
When I started writing about travel two decades ago, editors bullied me for two cardinal editorial sins: talking too much about myself (I just did it, again) and spoiling my text with disposable superlatives.
I would like to say that I have matured as such since then. But even now, when I lack the words to capture a position on earth that baffles me, I find myself reoccupied with the same hyperbolic bad habits.
So when Clark came up to the view in front of us with either arm and suggested that I perceive everything, there was only one thing left in my narrative arsenal: blasphemy.
“San [blank] Kappner. Is this [empty] position real?”
than the one in which one
With a total of 636 acres of past (and still almost entirely) undeveloped coastal mountains, cliffs, ancient semitropical rainforest, and wildlife-rich estuarine flatlands surrounded across 1 1/4 miles of personal beach in the Pacific Ocean, there are few other comparable landscape coastlines that have been assembled contiguously and personally between Alaska and Panama since the early 20th century. For reference, the Club Med average is 50 acres; Maximum Mexican mega-resorts in places like Cancun or Cozumel cover a little over 25 acres.
“Mandarina was first found by helicopter during a reconnaissance vacation off the coast of the Riviera Nayarit,” Clark tells me in what I am temporarily informed of is her typical low-key manner. “The stunning jungle-covered mountains surrounding the plains, estuary and long sandy beach in the middle really caught our attention. “
That RLH Properties’ vision of the ground they had discovered was nevertheless transposed into the hotel and residential network it is today is an even greater miracle.
It’s also a testament to what a specific real estate development company can do when it brings all of its talents together in pursuit of what less agile companies would never have had the ability to see in the first place.
It’s an ancient myth of hospitality that hotels and resorts create out of nowhere overnight. However, anyone who has been working in the advertising real estate industry for some time will say that there is nothing but the truth.
From His Vision, One
“The 636 acres of what is now Mandarina originally belonged to 58 other local families who had received the land as farmers generations ago,” Clark recalls of the early days of the development. “We had to buy back from each of those families of origin. one by one, rarely having to locate their descendants who lived in other countries for each of them to buy. It took at most two years of negotiation and patience on both sides before we could regroup all the plots into a contiguous domain and the latest resistances were the most complicated component because we may not have made our vision imaginable without all the pieces in place.
From a progression and structure perspective, Mandarina also bit more than RLH had chewed before, designed to be completely integral from the ground up. That technique, Clark says, was opposed to the company’s successful buying and upgrading style in the past. with its other existing luxury hotels and resorts in Mexico City, the Riviera Maya and Spain. It also meant adopting an entirely new technique for managing timelines, structure, and costs, while taking on a new point of precarious risk.
But after that first helicopter flight, everyone at RLH knew that in Mandarina they had found authentic gold.
« El de Uno
Since RLH also comes from 636 acres of pristine, undeveloped land in the middle of nowhere, the progression of the season required a delicate balance between placing imperceptible critical infrastructure like electric power and water and cutting off subtle, winding roads through the ancient forest canopy without displacing wildlife. terraform the landscape or remove the old white fig trees and paper that existed before the arrival of the Spanish conquerors.
It’s no secret that many resorts in Mexico, especially in places like Cancun and Acapulco in the 1980s and 1990s, are more bulls than butterflies, trampling on the earth rather than gently touching it. Mandarina’s core design philosophy, on the other hand, has been intended to take a more lepidoptera approach, borrowing nature cues such as topography, light, canopy, orientation, and view so that its built environment blends in and respects the herb environment rather than remodeling it.
“As with any design at Mandarina, we took great inspiration from our technique of progression from the first day of the earth itself,” Clark recalls of RLH’s original vision for the design of the property. “One of our biggest goals was to have how Poco will have an imaginable effect on this incredible site, with the goal that long-term visitors and citizens can simply enjoy Mandarina in its crudest and most real form and maintain that innate robustness of nature while offering an ultra-luxurious 5-star experience. “
To do this, RLH Properties recruited a director of progression for RLH Properties, who in the past was director of urban structure for one of Mexico’s largest general contractor corporations and had delivered some of the country’s most challenging and high-profile buildings, such as the Los Cabos International Convention Center, where the G20 summit was held in 2012, the Acapulco International Airport and the Toluca Stadium, which has twice hosted the World Cup.
“The good looks and prospect of this position required something ambitious and unique, but just as important, from other people who shared our vision and knew what was at stake to get it right and open on time, especially when the pandemic hit. “said RLH Properties CEO Borja Escalada. Construction was halted in quarantine when the Mexican government banned non-essential work. Then there were strict rules that we had to follow. This ended up delaying the opening of the hotel by a few months, however, we were able to open the same year we originally planned thanks to the team we had assembled.
Today, years after its genesis moment in a helicopter, One
This is no small thing when it comes to projects of Mandarina’s scale, size, scope, and position, and whose unforeseen bottlenecks and unforeseen occasions like pandemics usually force developers to tweak their original visions to catch up or save money, and almost result in compromises. and regrets for owners and long-term guests.
“Honoring the land and its rich history with the Cora and Huichol tribes was from day one a basic component of mandarina’s idea from which we were never going to deviate,” continues Escalada, executive director of RLH. “We look to our visitors and citizens of personal apartments to feel a deep connection to this original position at Mandarina. It has been incredibly rewarding to see today how much our visitors and citizens truly appreciate this heritage and respect it, even if they don’t perceive what it cost us to do. that happens.
Most genuine real estate developers would also like to tell you that there are no accidental moments in wonderful architecture, just mistakes. However, at the heart of Mandarina’s design from the beginning was the essential premise that nothing would be missing. Every detail and Touch would be intuitive, useful, contextual, respectful, soft and light – a lesson that all other luxury hotel brands take into account, especially when designing in delicate habitats and locations around the world, respecting the desire to honor local culture and traditions. whether born of cowboys or coras.
“Everything about Mandarina is intentional for a reason,” Clark says, gently massaging his hands as if he were holding a small, fragile shell, delicate enough to show it off and make it break. “From the biggest visions to the smallest details. “
Outside of this philosophy, Mandarina’s most memorable moments are surprisingly organized from touchpoints that are sophisticated and meaningful, so you occasionally don’t know they’re coming to you, but you can never know once they do.
The arched break wall at the Jetty Beach Club, for example, is shaped like volcanic rock carved into a position structure to mimic the most sensitive part of the ancient volcano that still exists underwater here, but you’d never see it unless someone tells you to. Every night, something new emerges from a local artisan that reflects a conscious Huichol cultural precept as a component of the turndown service, with a detailed description of what it is so you know why it’s important. And on Mandarina’s 636 acres, the exposed progression of local petroglyphs has been preserved precisely where they were discovered along the trails, so you know who came here before you and what they believed in.
It is also because of this planned philosophy of marksmanship and respect that everyone at Mandarina puts their right hand in the center to greet you, which is the first thing that caught my attention when I arrived.
Depending on your point of individual cynicism, it would be simple to assume that the greeting was born from a recently graduated marketing expert who had never been here before. But it turns out to be one of Mandarina’s purest and most suggestive “moments,” evoking one’s basic sense of service, connection, and loyalty.
“The origin comes from an ancient forgotten culture of the Huichol tribe in the mountains of Jalisco and Nayarit that when you receive someone in your home, your center has to be in white and pure,” says Serge Ditesheim, general manager of Hotel One. .
Taken together, if that sounds like the land scarcity RLH has discovered here, the company’s original vision for what it’s built here and its partnership with One.
Any developer who manages to seize waterfront assets in today’s real estate market, especially in sunny climates such as Florida, Mexico, the South Pacific or the Caribbean, has the opportunity to marry almost each and every luxury call in the hotel industry. a new 4-star hotel or a branded residential community. However, when it came time to marry One
Much of the math, Muuls notes, is just the brand’s ultra-luxurious global cache, which was built over 20 years around some of the most pristine, exclusive and hard-to-develop places in the world, such as Maldives, Mauritius, South Africa, Rwanda. and Dubai.
The other component of RLH’s logic is what Muuls vaguely calls “starvation supply. “
“We first thought about working with other luxury hotel operators,” Muuls says. “But, despite everything, we chose One
At the same time, Muuls is also quick to acknowledge that Mandarina is not a guaranteed dive with Sol Kerzner, the founder of One.
“Fifteen minutes after his first stop here, on the cliff where our Restaurant Carao now stands, Sol Kerzner calmly said, ‘Okay. ‘For all of us who were there at RLH, there was immediately this initial fear that his “OK” was intended to be dismissive and that he no longer needed to continue the tour. This meant that after only 15 minutes, I was already convinced that I was looking for One to
About the One’s Private Home collection
Each of One’s five- to eight-bedroom villas
As with any Mandarin, this earth-friendly design technique for the residential component of the complex was also intentional, Clark says. Each villa is architecturally exclusive and site-specific to merge with the landscape rather than stand out from it, founded climate- and environmentally-sensitive design, while taking a humble technique to scale and mass so that Mandarina’s nature occupies an intermediate place.
“Every day, when you wake up, you can know what kind of delight you need to have here,” says Rick Joy, one’s master architect.
Intent and context also describe the shape, color, texture and fabrics of One’s villas.
“When we arrived in the area where luxury, fun and sustainability came together, we felt a deep sense of duty to raise the bar for our industry, not just in Mexico, but around the world,” Clark says. In the end, we think that if we stay true to the values that Mandarina has been – context, purpose, sensitivity, respect – this would be reflected in each and every one of the essences of the project, from the architecture, the interior design, to the amenities and delights that One
If there can be one last detail in Mandarina, the last position I visited on my vacation with Clark was a position called “Flatlands” at the back of Mandarina, about a mile from the beach, which would first make you feel that way is the kind of position where you park trucks and structure the appliance during the day and do your best to get your kids to avoid the night.
But here, in a fertile, wildlife-rich estuarine valley between two mountainous levels flanked by one of the longest personal beaches on Mexico’s Pacific coast, RLH made the decision to build an equestrian and polo center, one of only 3 in Riviera Nayarit and a handful in North America. where all the other developers would have built just another golf course.
That’s a lot of ground, and a huge load of opportunity, true to a dubious end result given the comparison between niche polo as a game and golf. Complex One.
“We wanted Mandarina to be exclusive and offer a great party that’s hard to find anywhere else in the world,” Clark says. “We were attracted to polo because it’s a game that the whole circle of family members can play together. “, whether watching from your picnic on the sidelines, sipping champagne at the chop hit, or taking turns playing. to the beach.
As for the so-called “Mandarina”, which is based on the root of the mandarin tree, “it is a position where all the elements of nature, life and enjoyment meet dramatically”, says the managing director of One.
Now it’s also a symbol, Clark adds, of what luxury hospitality means today: disconnecting from the world, reconnecting with yourself, reconnecting with loved ones and family, and being in a position that enriches your appointments with the world of herbs.
“The joy of connectivity in today’s world occurs with maximum fluidity in nature, so at Mandarina we seek to create a place where visitors and citizens can have the opportunity to immerse themselves in nature, where the sounds of trains, planes and cars would be repositioned through the song of the birds of the jungle and the waves of the Pacific breaking on the shore.
For what is valuable to a travel editor who is still addicted to superlatives and hyperbole, I am looking for the words to do justice to the essence and perspective of this place. So I leave you with the only two I have left. : Saint [blank].
The 55 houses of one