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Hospès Palacio del Bailio
Hotel Tomo
La Purificadora, Boutique Hotel
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Legorreta + Legorreta blend modern, vernacular and historic influences in a spaciously elegant hotel in a historic city.
In the late 1960s, Ricardo Legorreta’s Camino Real Mexico in Mexico City stunningly demonstrated that a hotel could be high modern and ultra-glamorous. During a time when hotel-chain file boxes and souped-up Miami slabs dominated hospitality architecture, Legorreta’s hotel, with its polychromatic, taut, planar, stucco forms, interspersed with lushly landscaped outdoor rooms, set a new standard.
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Fortunately for Puebla, a city 90 miles southeast of Mexico City, the 76-year-old architect, now working with his son Victor, has brought his distinctive imprimatur to the heart of its historic section, listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site. La Purificadora, the hotel Legorreta + Legorreta designed (along with the firm of Serrano Monjaraz Arquitectos), occupies the remains of a 1844 stone-walled factory where water was bottled and purified for ice.
It helps to have the right client—Grupo Habita, an adventurous boutique hotel operation in Mexico City.
With its latest (and sixth) hotel, Grupo Habita was asked by a Spanish/Mexican real estate and construction company to conceive and operate the 26-room luxury hotel in Puebla, a city founded by Spaniards in 1531. The hotel was to be knitted into the dense urban fabric adjacent to the Spanish Colonial San Francisco church, a convention center, sculpture park, a new shopping mall––all part of an urban development plan known as Paseo San Francisco. Because the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) had designated the building as part of the city’s historic patrimony, the hotel design was given a fair amount of scrutiny by archeologists.
While keeping the local stone walls of the original one-story structure, Legorreta + Legorreta added three additional stories to the hotel––with a restaurant on the ground floor, and a bar-lounge on the roof, complete with a long glass-sided swimming pool and even a gym. The team reworked the original ground floor entry to the old factory for the hotel entrance; it now opens onto a stone-walled vestibule, flanked by a small reception room on one side and library on the other. The hotel’s spaces, including guestrooms, are arranged in an L around a large, sheltered, open-air patio warmed by open, stone fireplaces and a grand stair. Where the stair terminates at the second floor, glass open-riser stairs continue to the third level and finally the sheltered roof terrace overlooking the city.
Formal name of project: La Purificadora, Boutique Hotel
Location: Puebla, México
Completion Date: May 2007
Gross square footage: 12,679.88 sq.ft
Total construction cost: $5,116,600
Land Owner : Plus Arrendamientos Inmobiliarios S.A. de C.V.
Architect:
Legorreta + Legorreta
Palacio de Versalles 285 A
Col. Lomas Reforma CP 11020
Mexico City, MEXICO
Ph: (52) 55 5251 9698
F: (52) 55 5596 6162
Serrano Monjaraz Arquitectos
Blvd. Manuel Avila Camacho No. 184, Piso 10
Col. Reforma Social CP 11650
Mexico City, MEXICO
Ph: (52) 55 5202 1268
F: (52) 55 5202 6030
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