Maroma: Tara Bernerd Builds an Interior Around Mexican Craft
The 2023 redesign of Maroma by Tara Bernerd & Partners begins with an existing place: a collection of white buildings between tropical jungle and Mexico’s Caribbean coast. The commission reworked a well-established property while retaining a connection to its architecture and setting. For Bernerd’s team, Mexican craft became a way to give that continuity a tangible form.
Within the rooms, tiles, rugs and timber doors establish a more detailed scale of experience. Their colours sit within the larger architectural composition, while variations in making give the individual surfaces their character.
Preserving the character of a house
Hospitality Design’s account traces the property to a private home built by architect José Luis Moreno in the 1970s. It grew to accommodate visiting friends before becoming a hotel. In her interview with the publication, Bernerd described retaining that sense of domesticity as a central concern of the renovation.
This history changes how the project can be read. Its rooms belong to an estate that developed over time, giving the design an inherited character to work with. The team sought to connect indoor and outdoor spaces while keeping the white stucco architecture integral to the experience. The aim was continuity at the scale of the whole property, alongside change at the scale of individual interiors.
A material palette with named makers
Belmond identifies ceramicist José Noé Suro as the collaborator behind more than 700,000 hand-painted Jalisco clay tiles for the guest rooms. Henequen Textiles produced agave-fibre rugs, while artist Eduardo Ricon created shadow boxes containing native botanicals. Those commissions bring ceramics, weaving and collected plant forms into the same interior language.
Clay forms a repeated field across a room, fibre creates a softer plane underfoot, and the botanical boxes invite closer attention. Their textures let the crafted elements remain distinct within the overall scheme. Painted surfaces, woven structures and natural plant forms offer different kinds of detail.
Furniture across a varied accommodation programme
LVMH’s reopening announcement records 72 rooms, suites and villas and states that the furniture and decorative elements were designed for the hotel. It reports that approximately 80 percent of the furnishings were handcrafted in Mexico. That figure describes a substantial part of the interiors, rather than every material used throughout the development.
The range of accommodation makes a consistent furnishing language valuable. Objects developed for the property can connect different room arrangements without forcing them into identical compositions. Their role is both visual and practical: establishing a shared character while supporting the different ways a bedroom, sitting area or larger villa is occupied.
Texture at the threshold
The published material palette also includes handwoven textiles from Oaxaca, glazed tiles from Guadalajara, Yucatán timber doors and chandeliers made with shells. Curved forms and views towards the Caribbean connect these close-up details to the larger setting.
Maroma’s redesign holds those two distances together. The architecture and landscape establish the broad experience, while the rooms become more particular through their crafted elements. A doorway is also a piece of timber work; a floor is also a field of individual tiles. That attention to the parts gives the renovation a material depth that can be understood without reducing the project to a decorative theme.
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