HW Studio’s response — the architecture firm founded by Vallejo Bores — was to reduce the project to its most elemental components: a floor, a roof, a shadow. It is the logic of the enramada, that minimal structure that needs to represent nothing because it already fulfils its essential condition — to shelter, to protect from sun and rain, to let the landscape unfold around it without interference. Casa Malonic follows that same logic; the horizon is its reason for being. The project’s first sketches already reflect this.

Walking through the house to discover it

From the street, the house presents itself as a compact white mass, accompanied by a single curved concrete wall that follows the road, marking the boundary with the street. Vegetation, stone and topography keep the house from revealing itself all at once; it must be walked through to be discovered in its true dimension. This route leads to a circular courtyard of white walls, where the landscape appears again: a great void within the built space. “Architecture begins to lose its condition as boundary and becomes a way of directing the gaze and the body toward the beauty of the surrounding nature”, the architect says, adding, “the project is organised around a transition: from the street to the shelter, from the shelter to the courtyard, from the courtyard to the landscape. Architecture begins as protection and ends up being, barely, a shadow against the horizon”.

Earth and colour turned into matter

The materials sustain the relationship with the place. “Materiality does not aim to represent the landscape, but to establish a sensory continuity with it. Architecture is experienced first with the feet, before it is understood with the eyes”, Vallejo explains. The floor recovers the colour and texture of the sand from the nearby beach, as if the house had found a way to extend that ground beneath its own roof. The white of the walls is a nod to the immediate surroundings: the nine cacalosúchil trees — the tree that the Aztecs and Maya considered sacred and reserved as an ornament for rulers — bloom around the house in a white identical to that of its walls.

Essential architecture

This way of working — reducing architecture to the essential, letting the void organise the sense of space — can be traced through Vallejo Bores’s entire career; he has long maintained that the sense of calm he pursues in his projects has less to do with shaping material than with sculpting the void, which ends up being more decisive than form itself. In Casa Malonic that principle becomes evident in the circular courtyard, in the subtraction of wall that allows the sky to become part of the domestic experience, in the insistence that the house not compete with the landscape but dissolve into it progressively. Vallejo himself sums it up with a formula that could apply to his entire body of work: “The white mass protects. The wall guides. The void lets the landscape in. The roof offers shade. And the horizon remains”.

Project: Casa Malonic.
Location: Punta Garrobo, Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, México
Completed: June 2026.
Area: 497 m².
Architecture: HW Studio.
Principal architect:: Rogelio Vallejo Bores.
Architects: Oscar Didier Ascencio Castro y Nik Zaret Cervantes Ordaz.
Team: Juan Pablo Camacho Ayala.
Structural engineering: Arga Constructora.
Construction: Comaqso.
Photography: César Béjar.
Source: HW Studio.

Rogelio Vallejo Bores. HW Studio

There are cities that teach architecture without meaning to, and Morelia was Rogelio Vallejo Bores’s first school. He grew up in its historic centre, among quarries and vaults that had spent centuries filtering light in exactly the same way, and he remembers with clarity the moment that presence, until then a mere backdrop, became revelation: sitting in the Temple of San Agustín, his eyes on the vaults, completely captivated by the way the sun entered and transformed the space. As a child he imagined a life as a doctor. But that early fascination with light, material, and the emotional effect of well-built spaces was, he says today, the quiet seed of his entire practice, the awareness that design can profoundly affect those who inhabit it.

Vallejo is an architect from Universidad Vasco de Quiroga, holds a master’s in Art and New Technologies from Universidad Europea de Madrid, and a master’s in Design and Innovation from Valencia, a city where he also collaborated with Fran Silvestre Arquitectos. His training expanded with a workshop alongside RCR Arquitectes —winners of the Pritzker Prize— in Olot, Catalonia, and with a conceptual development programme at Aires Mateus’s studio in Lisbon, in 2023. From each of these experiences he took away a way of looking: attention to the void, an economy of means, the conviction that the essential, properly understood, is enough.

At the helm of HW Studio Arquitectos, the practice he founded in 2010, Vallejo has built a body of work he himself describes as quiet, precise, and attentive to the subtle poetry of space. He pursues a simplicity that never falls into sterility, spaces the inhabitant can fully inhabit, where every line, every proportion, and every material has a reason for being. “Architecture that whispers rather than shouts,” he says, “that creates environments inviting reflection, contemplation, a serene awareness of one’s own presence.” His architecture rests on a method of his own, almost ritual. Every project is born from three interwoven elements: the inhabitant, the site, and the design team itself.

To understand the inhabitant, Vallejo and his studio immerse themselves in the spaces that have shaped that person’s life —the homes they have lived in, the places where they have experienced joy or calm— and even draw on a psychological instrument applied by a neuropsychologist, whose readings they later translate into spatial gestures, scale, and materiality. The site, in turn, is never a simple plot of land: it is a living presence they visit again and again, observing how light moves through the day, what textures the materials hold, what sounds are absorbed or echo. And to understand themselves as designers, they practise Zen meditation: through silence and attentive presence they cultivate a perceptive sensitivity, a way of sensing the invisible currents of space, time, and light. From that intimate conversation between inhabitant, site, and self, a building slowly emerges: every wall, every modulation, every proportion becomes an echo of a lived experience.

Vallejo believes, with growing clarity, that the sense of calm he pursues has less to do with shaping material and more with sculpting the void —what the Japanese call ma. That means thinking of space not as absence but as presence: a silent frame in which light, shadow, and human experience can unfold.

His references speak the same restrained language. Among his favourite works of architecture in the world are the Entoku-in temple in Kyoto and the Teshima Art Museum in Kagawa: one traditional, the other contemporary, sharing, in Vallejo’s view, a delicate sensitivity to void, material, and human presence. Among his declared influences are Tadao Ando, Kengo Kuma, and Luis Barragán, architects whose work he describes as poetic, subtle, and deeply connected to light, material, and human experience; and, further back, Buddhist wisdom, which taught him attention, silence, and a deep awareness of presence.

That way of looking, forged between Morelia, Valencia, Olot, and Lisbon, has not gone unnoticed. In just a few years, HW Studio has received recognitions such as Design Vanguard 2024 and Record House 2023, both from Architectural Record; a nomination for the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Architecture 2024, awarded by the Illinois Institute of Technology; the German Design Award 2024 for excellence in architecture; the Kyoto Global Design Award 2023; and distinctions from Azure Magazine, Architecture Hunter Awards, Archello Awards, and Loop Design Awards, among others. His work has been published in Architectural Record, Azure, Architectural Digest, Dezeen, Archello, and Architizer, and the studio has been named among Mexico’s finest architecture firms and among Latin America’s most influential practices.

Asked what advice he wishes someone had given him when he was starting out, Vallejo speaks not of strategy or craft, but of surrender: “I wish someone had told me not to fight so much, to let myself flow with life, beyond the plans and illusions of one’s own ego.” We are here, he says, to experience a multitude of emotions, and one of them —suffering— arises from the desire for things to be other than they are. Accepting life as it is, with its moments of joy and pain, seems to him the most essential lesson, both for living and for designing. “Trust your own perception and your own silence,” he adds. “It is easy to be distracted by trends, recognition, or the desire to impress. But architecture is about how people experience themselves, not about showing off.”

If he had to sum up his architecture in a mantra, Vallejo would choose a rare but deeply moving instant that meditation sometimes grants him: those brief seconds of silence in which even the inner monologue stops, leaving nothing but a pure, still space. That absence of noise, that silence, is what he tries to instil in every one of his buildings. He returns, inevitably, to the child sitting beneath the vaults of the Temple of San Agustín in Morelia, watching the light change shape without anyone having taught him to see it. Thirty years on, his entire architecture remains an attempt to return that instant to whoever inhabits it.