Yucatecans

House Hunting

2010-11-23T09:02:00.001-08:00

Rumor has it...

UPDATE:
Rumor has it they are not hunting for house together anywhere anymore!!!

Ford Wheeler

2010-11-23T08:49:00.000-08:00

Ford Wheeler Film production designer and master tarte-maker. List Santa Lucia as one of his favorite flea markets in the world... there goes the neighborhood.

Ricard Frazier & Laura Kirar

2010-10-31T20:23:00.001-07:00

Laura Kirar, Trudesign founder and creative designer with her husband Richard Frazier are Yucatan hacienados on Day of the Dead 2010. More fun than a barrel of spider monkeys! Designing lives from NYC to Miami to Merida.

Xila

2010-05-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

Sheila Matthews I met a couple of years ago when she bought a house in my block. It turns out she too is from Texas and so we set off in search of the taco al carbon mecca that had eluded me for so many years. Most of the year she lives in Bodrum, Turkey where she excavates ship wrecks.

"Archaeologist, diver, ship reconstructor, author, mapping expert, illustrator, traveler, Sheila seems always to be in demand. Where in the world does she also find the time for her passion, riding horses! "

James Brown

2010-05-13T13:31:00.000-07:00

A couple of years after I moved to Merida there was a great house around the corner from me. I kept trying to get different friends to buy it and no one did. One day I heard it had been sold. It turns out James Brown and his wife Alexandra bought it! I had lost touch with him for about 15 years. I first came to know of James through his paintings in a little gallery in the East Village called Naturemorte in the early 80's. That was before I became a failed artist. I met James just before I moved to Paris in 1985. Then he turned up in Paris a couple of years later. He still has a great studio on Rue des Plantes and mostly works in Paris but soon he plans to do more work in Mexico. For a couple of years that house was piled to the ceiling with all of their possessions from the NY studio and the hacienda in Oaxaca. So for a couple of years they always stayed with me and Josh while they were here in Merida. Then in 2008 the Browns bought the house in front of their house and that house has a house behind it which opens onto an alley. The new house is James studio and storage. The Alley house belongs to his son Dagenhart who spent his gap year here in Merida. I long for the days when they will at least linger here through the spring and return in the fall. Winter is too short!

Vija Celmins

2010-05-13T12:45:00.000-07:00

Webmaker and birdwatcher Vija Celmins finally ended her search for a home in Merida. After two years of ardent searching just at the moment when she was going to make an offer on a house in my neighborhood of Ermita a bigger better house popped up in Mejorada and she grabbed it. The lawyer was dragged out of bed early Sunday morning. The papers were signed and Vija was off to Chichen Itza for the rest of the day. She spent the night at Hacienda Chichen and was up before dawn on the bird walk. By noon she was back on a plane to New York. We finished renovating her house in the winter of 2008.

Here is a link to her show in NY at McKee Gallery through June 25, 2010. This is her first gallery show in NY since 2001. She paints that slowly and perfectly.

Nicholas Malleville & Francesca Bonato

2009-11-14T11:53:00.000-08:00

Coqui Coqui is a spa created by Nicholas Malleville an Argentinian botanist, landscape architect and model with locations in Valladolid, Coba and Tulum. On my 3rd attempt in a year I found the doors to the Valladolid spa and perfumery closed again. As I was driving off I saw Nicholas walk up to the locked door and scream for Francesca. No one came to the door but he went to the neighbors and climbed over the wall and after adjusting the lights he let me in. I'd gone in search of a fragrance to replace L'eau Trois which was recently discontinued by Dyptique. My friend Kathleen Baird-Murray the world foremost authority on spas (in my acquaintance) and the former beauty editor of Tatler had just passed through Valladolid and brought me a couple of likely contenders from Coqui Coqui. Nicholas was very kind to give us a tour and recommend a nice Italian restaurant on the square Candelaria. Finally Francesca came down from her massage 8 months pregnant. We talked about the virtues of various hospitals in Merida and exchanged emails. The next day I dropped in to say goodbye as I had work to do in Merida and after 4 hours of non-stop talk I got in my car and back on the highway.

I wondered if my life would not have been more like his if I'd gone directly from Paris to Tulum instead of stopping off in NYC waste most of my hard earned modeling money in restaurants and auction houses. We agreed to make a trade. When Francesca gives birth in early December I'll loan them my house and when I have a break I'll be their guest in Coba or Tulum.

Go read the W article and you'll understand why I'd like to trade my life for his. I'm just not sure I could fit in my 5 dogs.

Carla Zarebska

2007-12-03T09:30:00.000-08:00

Carla Zarebska has moved to Merida from Oaxaca bringing with her a private stock of her famouso Guadalupe book and a very lethal chicken heart Mescal. I highly recommend them both. Carla now has her own website and here is an interview of her as well.

About the Guadalupe book:

Carla Zarebska, Jaqueline Robinson López, Translator Alejandro Gómez de Tuddo, Photographer From an original idea by Basilisco Long before the arrival of Hernán Cortés, birds, serpents, the sun and moon, and human sacrifices figured prominently in the rituals and daily spiritual life of the inhabitants of today's Mexico. In the early sixteenth century, Roman Catholic missionaries began arriving in the area of Tenochtitlan--Mexico City--to convert the native Mexica to Christianity. The priests met with limited success until 1531, the year Juan Diego, a poor Mexica, first encountered the vision of the "Heavenly Lady," now known as "Our Lady of Guadalupe." Guadalupe is a lavishly illustrated history of Mexico's religious traditions. Touching briefly on the pre-Columbian decades of many deities, Carla Zarebska devotes most of the book to the post-colonial centuries of Catholicism, the Madre of modern Mexico, and the traditions and legends surrounding her. Primitive drawings and black-and-white photos from the early twentieth century depict natives honoring the Lady, and full color photos and paintings commemorate events and individuals from Mexico's history, including the Virgin Mary's appearances to Juan Diego. Over a dozen pages offer the story of Guadalupe's appearances in the native Nahuatl accompanied by the English translation.

David Sterling

2007-12-03T08:04:00.000-08:00

David and his partner Keith came to Merida in 2003 and opened los-dos a cooking school. Los Dos is the first school in Mexico devoted exclusively to the cuisine of Yucatan. Featured widely in magazines such as Condé Nast Traveler, Travel & Leisure and Gourmet, and on broadcast television such as Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen channel and with Rick Bayless on PBS, Chef David Sterling’s Los Dos school has become a “must-do” destination in Yucatán, along with the spectacular Mayan ruins and many natural wonders.

I've only heard rave reviews of the school and Chef David. I rely on his website reviews when recommending restaurants in Merida. He's kinder and gentler than me. Maybe that is because he is from Oklahoma and I'm from Texas.....

Keith Heitke

2007-12-03T07:49:00.000-08:00

Keith and his partner David came to live Merida about two years after us. They also came from NYC. We just moved around the corner from them. Keith is the owner of Hacienda Mexico. They also find the time to renovate houses. They do very fine and beautiful work. Keith also finds the time to host the Merida House tour to benifit the Merida English Library.

Hacienda Mexico Luxury and Unique Properties focuses exclusively on prestige properties of utmost quality, or those with all the potential to be so. Potential buyers can look at a select list of homes that appeal to their lifestyle instead of wasting time scouring many listings of lesser quality. And for potential sellers, our team and infrastructure ensure that your home is seen by the right people people who will turn into buyers of your property because of our enthusiastic and infectious belief in the value, beauty, and salability of your home.

Here is an informative interview with Keith from Yucatan Living.

  

Tanja & Eben

2007-12-03T07:35:00.000-08:00

Tanja Tibaldi and Eben Lenderking are living part time in Merida and part of the time in Morocco. They own this hotel in Morrocco. They bought and sold the hacienda Santa Maria Acu. And we renovated a small house for them on reforma which they sold as well. They currently own an old house around the corner from me called the Water Sellers House which has one of the largest gardens in centro.

Jeremiah Tower

2007-12-03T06:06:00.000-08:00

We met Jeremiah when he came to town from Cozumel to buy a house. That was a couple of years ago when I thought I'd try my had at selling houses. I was a little to sucessful at that and it led to my selling 6 houses in two months which led to Josh and I designing and renovating 8 houses in the past two years. One of those houses I sold to Jeremiah. He designed and renovated

Widely recognized as the godfather of modern American cooking and a mentor to such rising celebrity chefs as Mario Batali, Jeremiah Tower is one of the most influential cooks of the last thirty years. Now, the former chef and partner at Chez Panisse and the genius behind Stars San Francisco tells the story of his lifelong love affair with food -- an affair that helped to spark an international culinary revolution. Tower shares with wit and honesty the real dish on cooking, chefs, celebrities, and what really goes on in the kitchen. Above all, Tower rhapsodizes about food -- the meals choreographed like great ballets, the menus scored like concertos. No other book reveals more about the seeds sown in the seventies, the excesses of the eighties, and the self-congratulations of the nineties. No other chef/restaurateur who was there at the very beginning is better positioned than Jeremiah Tower to tell the story of the American culinary revolution.

Party like it's 1999

2007-12-03T05:55:00.000-08:00

The first problem we encountered after moving here was that we were young compared to most of the Gringos here. I was still in my mid fourties and Josh in his early thirties. Everyone else was retired except Mitch and Jen. That meant endless cocktail parties. Thank God most weekends found us alone at the beach. But if you went to one cocktail party you'd be invited to 2 more and soon you'd be stumbling from one to another as they backed up on one another. After about a year of saying yes we started saying no. We stopped giving and going to cocktail parties. We stopped going to Nafta parties. We stopped meeting people too. If you moved to Merida in the past 4 years you probably don't know us. More recently we don't even see our friends. Renovating 8 houses in 2 years has taken it's toll. Now we stumble off to bed at 9pm instead of stumble off to our 3rd cocktail party.

How we got here

2007-12-03T05:14:00.000-08:00

I discovered Merida while vacationing in Tulum in the winter of 1997 with my friend Anne Ball. When I met Josh in 1998 we immediately started looking for a place to live in Mexico. Our first trip took us from DF to Puebla, Oaxaca, Zijatinejo, Patzcuaro, San Miguel. Oaxaca and San Miguel . It was on another fact finding trip in 1999 that we decided that Merida seemed to be the right combination. A city on the brink, of what we were not sure. Our real estate agents became our first and fast friends. First we met Mitch Keenan who showed us several haciendas like Santa Cruz de Palomeque and Xtephen. We ended up buying a little house on the beach in Chabihau from Mitch and the houe in Ermita from his agent Jen Lytle. But it was the experience of being trapped on a island called Manhattan one September 11th that sent us scurrying through the tunnels as soon as we could pack our bags. We slept on the floor with our dogs for a couple of weeks in October 2001 and then we hired the first couple of guys we met in our neighborhood and started renovations. We've been renovating ever since.

We never thought Merida would grow so fast. It was a sleepy town when we came. We thought all of the gringos were tourist. Most of them were but we met a group of people through Mitch and Jen and the Nafta parties at the Merida English Library (MEL) that had been here for years. There was 1 real estate agent in town for Gringo's and that was Mitch Keenan. Through Mitch we met the newly wed Paula and Don. Through Jen we met the newly wed Josephina and Salvador. And through them we met every one in town. We went to the beach every weekend to escape the dust and rubble. We discovered that not all of the gringo's in town were tourists, some had been here for years.

In 1997 in Tulum I thought how strange it was coming from Paris, via NY, to this land where everyone is always friendly and smiling. After 2 days in Tulum I gave up on trying to contact my business in Paris and I began to relax. After 2 weeks in the Yucatan decided to move here. I gave up Paris and gave the business to my Partner. I stayed in NY and took some courses at NYU. If I had not met Josh I'd probably still be dreaming about living in the Yucatan.