One&Only Mandarina

One&Only Mandarina

Built into eighty acres of coastal rainforest on Mexico's Riviera Nayarit, where the southern edge of the Sierra Madre drops into the Pacific above the village of Lo de Marcos, an hour and a half by road north of Puerto Vallarta, One&Only Mandarina opened on the first of November, 2020, after several years of construction that required cutting almost nothing down. The masterplan came from Tucson architect Rick Joy, who set 105 standalone villas and treehouses among palm, bamboo and volcanic rock rather than clearing a footprint for them, an approach the property still uses as its central design argument. The land and the surrounding residential development belong to RLH Properties, the Mexican company behind Mandarina's parallel community of private homes, while the resort itself operates under license from Kerzner International, the group behind the One&Only name since 2002. The treehouses are raised twelve metres into the canopy on stilts, each with its own plunge pool and a terrace built from tropical hardwoods such as parota, and the cliffside villas step down toward the water in the same unpainted, sun-bleached palette of thatch, clay and stone. Villa One, the largest of the standalone units, has its own wine cellar, gym and spa room, a scale the smaller garden villas don't attempt to match. At the centre of the property a black-tiled pool anchors an open-air communal pavilion modelled loosely on the porches of a hacienda. Food runs through three kitchens of very different registers: Carao, the cliffside restaurant helmed by Enrique Olvera of Mexico City's Pujol, serves a nine-course taco tasting menu built around Oaxacan and Pacific coast ingredients; Alma, by the main pool, keeps to Mediterranean plates and wood-fired pizza; and Allora, on one of the resort's two beaches, does a looser Italian menu of linguine and grilled shrimp. A zero-waste bar sits up in the treetops, and beyond the kitchens there's a full equestrian club with two regulation polo fields, a jungle zip-line course, and a spa built as a scatter of open-air treatment rooms under the trees. What it feels like, more than anything, is scale handled carefully. This is not an intimate six-room hideaway pretending to be one, but a resort of over a hundred keys that has gone to real lengths, in the siting of every villa and the height of every treehouse, to make sure you rarely see another guest from your own terrace. The polo club and the kids' programme pull toward one kind of stay, family groups, milestone trips, the odd wedding party, while the cliffside villas and Carao's tasting menu pull toward another, couples wanting privacy with a serious kitchen attached. Mandarina holds both without either one crowding the other, which is a harder trick than it sounds for a property this size. You should not come if you want the scale and intimacy of a six- or eight-room boutique property, or if the presence of a working polo club and a busy kids' club nearby would bother you even at a distance. You should come for the villas themselves, for Olvera's kitchen at Carao, and for an architectural approach to jungle and cliff that very few resorts of this size have managed without flattening the site to build it. The short version: A 105 villa and treehouse resort on eighty acres of Riviera Nayarit rainforest, designed by Rick Joy to disturb almost nothing, with Enrique Olvera's kitchen at Carao and a working polo club attached.