Cuattro Casa de Café is a 402-square-meter hospitality project in Troncones, Guerrero, organized as a sequence of open-air passages, glazed pavilions, and planted clearings. Its cafe, bakery, craft shop, and office are arranged around mature trees that shape circulation, shade, drainage, and the relationship between enclosure and landscape.
Cuattro Casa de Café Technical Information
- ArchitectsFaci Leboreiro
- LocationTroncones, Guerrero, Mexico
- Gross Area402 m2 | 4,327 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years 2025
- Photographs© Rafael Gamo
The project emerges from the surrounding vegetation. Architecture frames time, creating its own microcosm.
– Carlos Faci and Marina Leboreiro
Building with Existing Vegetation and Coastal Climate
In Troncones, a coastal settlement in Guerrero shaped by heat, seasonal rain, and dense tropical growth, Cuattro Casa de Cafe treats existing vegetation as an ordering device rather than an image applied after construction. Mature tropical almond trees mediate the approach and obscure the building’s full extent. Their canopies establish a shaded threshold, allowing the low roof slabs and concrete supports to appear incrementally through foliage. This delayed reading shifts attention from object form toward the relation between built mass, tree cover, and ground.
The plan retains trees within and around the public program, using their locations to determine voids, passages, and roof openings. An open central passage supports cross-ventilation between the two primary volumes, while deep overhangs temper direct sun at the glazed facades. Gravel, planted beds, and dry-laid stone edges limit sealed ground. These permeable surfaces let rainwater enter the soil and keep the project closer to the site’s texture than a continuous paved commercial platform would.
The Corridor as Spatial Armature
A linear open-air corridor forms the project’s principal spatial armature. It begins at the entry boardwalk, passes between the cafe and bakery-shop volumes, and continues toward the restroom block, rear garden, and office pavilion. Rather than serving as a residual gap between enclosed rooms, this passage has the compositional authority of a primary room. It organizes movement, produces a clear directional sequence, and keeps the public program in continuous visual contact with the landscape.
Closely spaced exposed-concrete fins line both sides of the route, establishing a repetitive field that alternates compression and release. Their depth gives the concrete a more tectonic reading than a conventional colonnade, while their regular spacing intensifies perspective toward a preserved tree at the corridor’s far end. Timber sleepers laid transversely in gravel alter the cadence of walking and make the surface legible as a landscape construction. As daylight changes, leaf shadows register across the fins, sleepers, and narrow concrete edge strips, making the corridor as much an environmental instrument as a circulation device.
Offset Pavilions, Framed Voids, and Program
The public functions are divided between two elongated pavilions. The cafe, kitchen, and dining areas occupy one side of the central axis, while the bakery and craft shop occupy the other. Full-height glazing allows these programs to read across the passage without erasing the climatic separation provided by the open air. The bakery’s production and display areas remain visible to visitors, and the retail shelving extends the project’s material vocabulary through ceramics, woven goods, and timber display elements.
The two roof slabs are offset in plan and height, preventing the volumes from forming a symmetrical composition. At certain points their thick concrete fascias approach one another closely, creating a moment of tension between adjacent shelters. At the cafe’s end, a circular oculus cuts through the roof to preserve a mature tree. The opening turns the terrace into an occupied exterior room: a communal table and smaller dining settings gather beneath the canopy, while the tree trunk, circular deck, and roof edge define a concentrated relationship between dining, shade, and sky.
Material Continuity and Interior Landscape
The project relies on a limited material framework: exposed concrete, teak-toned timber, polished concrete floors, gray gravel, and rough dry-laid stone. Concrete provides structural mass and durable shaded edges, with board-formed textures, lift lines, and small surface voids retaining evidence of its casting. Timber moderates this mineral palette at ceilings, furniture, boardwalks, and doors. Its use across soffits is particularly significant, as it continues from interior rooms to exterior overhangs and visually lengthens each pavilion’s occupied depth.
Within the cafe, the polished concrete floor and timber ceiling establish a quiet enclosure for the more tactile elements of occupation. Woven chairs, clay luminaires, ceramic vessels, and wood furnishings add variation without competing with the primary structural rhythm. Green glazed tile at the service counter and terracotta-toned tile within the kitchen introduce more saturated surfaces at points of use. The architecture maintains its connection to the garden through framed glazing, pivoting doors, and extended soffits, so that interior life remains calibrated by tree trunks, filtered light, humidity, and the changing density of the surrounding vegetation.
About Faci Leboreiro
Faci Leboreiro is an architecture and interiors studio founded in 2011 by Carlos Faci and Marina Leboreiro, architects from Mexico City. The studio approaches each project with rigor and sensitivity, creating functional, aesthetic, and deeply human spaces that respond to their context and elevate the experience of those who inhabit them.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Construction company: Gonzalo Rolando
- Photography: Rafael Gamo
