ESH HOTEL
An exploration of timelessness through subtlety, where restraint allows architecture, material, and landscape to quietly shape the experience.
LOCATION
Huacas, Nosara.
Costa Rica
BUILT AREA
3000m2
STATUS
Built
SERVICES
Architecture
Interior Design
SECTOR
Hospitality
Wellness
Gastronomy
Timelessness and placemaking through subtlety
Hotel ESH is a three-level hospitality project in Huacas, Nosara, Costa Rica. The project was developed in collaboration with Mexico-based Sulkin Askenazi. Sulkin Askenazi led interior direction and select material decisions for the social areas. FAMM guided the masterplanning, overall direction, and primary architectural language. Both teams developed the bedroom typologies and site strategies.
The hotel sits on a hillside site with a creek at the lower edge of the property and trees under conservation. The site offers limited projected views for a destination hotel. As a result, the architecture takes on the role of destination and becomes a retreat from the busy streets nearby. The program is conceived as a complete compound. It includes a lobby, administrative offices, back-of-house, GM and staff quarters, and three room typologies (first-level duplex, second-level duplex, and villa). The social core brings together a bar, restaurant and dining, kitchen, pool decks and two-level pools, plus a wellness component with a spa, massage treatment room, and exterior sauna.
The architecture serves as a canvas, giving way to the hotel’s true protagonists: light, shadow, nature, people, and experience.
Volumetric decisions organize the project from the road. A defined stereotomic frontage concentrates administration and back-of-house, together with the service programs that support hotel operations, and establishes a clear presence toward the street. This move frees the opposite edge of the project. The resulting rhythm is rooted in functionality and gives the ensemble its character.
Architecturally, protruding concrete planes act as privacy filters within continuous duplex volumes, while staircases read as voids that release the massing and organize circulation around shared elements. The material system privileges a robust climatic logic: concrete, burnt wood, glazing, and vegetation as façade combine with a thatch-roof palapa that anchors communal shade and references a local tradition of sheltering social space. The structural system integrates concrete blocks, metal framing, and a wood roof structure for the palapa.
