Distinction, that je ne sais quoi that slips into gestures or the way we inhabit the world, often crystallizes into a single word: elegance. A quality that illuminates those who possess it, regardless of context, like a silent beacon. Frida Escobedo (Mexico City, 1979) is one of those souls who carries this innate, almost intangible grace. 

Boca de Agua, one of the latest projects her studio has signed off on, embodies these principles. A series of houses that, rather than being built, seem suspended in a murmur among the treetops, beside the Bacalar lagoon. Here, architecture doesn’t intrude, but dissolves into the landscape, as if it had always been there. “For me, it’s always better to be in conversation rather than impose. To try to recognize both differences and similarities, and accept them, in practice and metaphorically,” she says.