A HOME / A STORY

Hacienda Amor

San Miguel de Allende · The Agency

5 bedrooms
5.5 bathrooms
1,561 m² + 30,871 m² built + lot
$3,995,000 USD

The portrait

A house uncovered arch by arch

Stone arches, a garden of rosemary and orange blossom, and room for everyone. Ten minutes from San Miguel.

Some houses are transformed to begin again. Hacienda Amor had to be stripped back to be found.

When Don and Ruben first arrived, they could barely see it. Weeds had swallowed the garden, vines covered the arches, and every wall seemed to have chosen a different color. They came back a second time. That’s when they saw the stone.

That was enough.

The stone is local. It runs through the arches, walls and entryway, each piece cut and set with a level of craftsmanship that would be difficult to reproduce today. Much of what makes Hacienda Amor extraordinary was already here, waiting to be uncovered.

Hacienda Amor was the first house built in Candelaria. Charles Marsh built it for a big family: children, grandchildren, guests who came and stayed. A house meant, from the very beginning, to be filled.

The restoration took a year and a half, and it began with what they chose to remove. The vines, until the arches could breathe again. The colors, until the height and length of the walls could speak for themselves.

Then the house began to give back what it had been keeping.

Thirty boxes of original tile had been sitting in a basement for years. Today they’re in the kitchen, beneath the barrel vault. Behind the garage, they found stacks of Saltillo tile and turned them into the floors of the primary bathroom and closet, following a pattern they drew themselves.

They didn’t have to recreate the past. They found it here.

“I don’t even know what it would take, or what it would cost, to duplicate this stonework.”

Inside, Hacienda Amor does something unexpected for a house of its scale: it knows how to be small. Don and Ruben live day to day almost as if it were a one-bedroom house. The living room, dining room, kitchen and TV room make up their everyday life; the other rooms wait around the courtyard, each with its own door.

The living and dining rooms retain the generous proportions of a hacienda: high walls, deep spaces and a living room ceiling left bare so the eye can travel upward. Against this architecture, seventies Italian furniture and contemporary art feel entirely at home. Nothing competes with the stone.

One evening, the living room was cleared of its furniture and filled with tables for ninety guests. Conversations carried beneath the high ceilings, and for a few hours, the room became something entirely different. By the next day, the house had settled back into its familiar rhythm.

Beyond the courtyard, the house gives way to the landscape.

With Floresta, they planted hundreds of trees, raised retaining walls and lit the paths. The pool was meant to be discreet. It couldn’t be. The house called for something more generous, and the pool found its proportions.

There’s a pickleball court, a gym, a fire pit and an outdoor kitchen with a grill and pizza oven. But once you’ve walked through it all, it’s other things that stay with you: a mesquite with cacti climbing its trunk, tomatoes, cut flowers, and two trees from the old citrus orchard that bore fruit again after years of care.

Early in the morning, all you have to do is open the door. Sage, rosemary, lavender and orange blossom. Then comes the light, moving slowly across the stone, changing the house as the day unfolds.

Even what’s new seems to have come from what was already here. Under the porte-cochère at the entrance, a mosaic inspired by Rufino Tamayo was pieced together by hand from the tile left over in the basement. Beyond it, a stone building is now a ceramics and photography studio.

Among trees, stone and silence, it’s easy to forget how close town really is.

The next page

Hacienda Amor was built to hold many and, over time, learned to live with two. Maybe that’s why it never feels too big or too empty. It opens easily when others arrive, then quietly draws itself back around Don and Ruben when they leave. It took a second visit to truly see the house. Maybe some houses only need that: someone willing to look again.

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