How Summer Thornton Turned Her House in Mexico Into a Tropical Oasis
VERANDA presents: Designing the Dream with Summer Thornton. In this series, she'll walk us through her step-by-step process of building and designing Casa Rosada, her new home in Sayulita, Mexico. You can book the rental property through Instagram or their website.
I have my first high-school job at a landscaping company to thank for my not-so-secret passion. There, I maintained the perennials and annuals, and helped arrange the garden shop. Even as a teenager I loved getting my hands dirty and learning all about different types of plant species. It’s wild how many different types of plants there are. You can work with landscapes for decades and still keep discovering something you’ve never seen before.
Even with my early green thumb experience, I felt a little hesitation making the leap from buying plants for our Chicago climate to planning a tropical garden for Casa Rosada. It’s easy for tropical gardens to verge on cheesy, with lots of yellows and other bright colors. Rather than tropics-inspired, I decided Casa Rosada should be jungle-inspired: sensual, heavier, sexier—I imagined trailing vines and lush blooms and giant leaves.
I had a lot of learning to do. Not only did I need to learn the Latin names of plants I loved, but also their common names in Spanish. Luckily, our architect connected Josh and me with an old-school landscape designer, Jorge, who transported us to the garden of Eden.
As we drove down random dirt roads to meet Jorge and see his plants, I was expecting your average nursery. Nothing could have prepared me for the warm and creative soul who greeted us when we arrived—or the unbelievable garden he built from the barren land he bought decades ago. Time stopped as we wandered through paths draped with Dr. Seuss-like florals, a field of bougainvillea, strange blooms and enormous, hundred-year-old trees.
At one point, I found myself standing on a blanket of sea-urchin-like, hot-pink blooms. The tree they’d fallen from was so big, I hadn’t even noticed it. When I picked up a fuchsia flower and held it in my palm, I didn’t even feel like I was on planet Earth.
That is the experience I want our guests to have when they arrive at Casa Rosada, so for the entrance, I chose a Clavellina tree, this wild tree that sits around naked until winter, when the otherworldly blooms come alive on the branches and then carpet the ground.
Like most homes in Latin America, Casa Rosada doesn’t have a front yard. Instead, a courtyard anchors the home and welcomes our visitors. From the courtyard, visitors’ eyes go straight to the infinity pool and beyond to the beach. The courtyard is also home to the stairs leading to the second floor.
We incorporated plants to give this space a lush feel, and to provide definition. In every corner, two-story-tall palm trees look as if they’re growing up through the floor. Matching planters with dramatic agave line the stairwell, and philodendron trails like a tropical ivy from the second-floor balcony.
Because our backyard is the beach, we created several terraces for greenery. One of my favorites is a lovely palm tree garden with a view direct to the ocean, large birds of paradise palms, and a grassy area. You can find me down here cutting blooms and leaves for my many Oaxacan vases at Casa Rosada.
To the right of the pool, the hot tub offers another relaxing getaway. Here, we added a pretty, built-in daybed, surrounded by fragrant blooming, romantic plants, like jasmine.
And I’m excited about a cutting garden on the north side of the house with birds of paradise and ginger.
Another thing that differentiates Casa Rosada from my home in the states: In almost every room, there’s a seamless transition from the indoors to the outdoors. The dining room is completely open, and you can’t even close off the living room. Bringing plants indoors felt very natural—but I definitely pushed the limits on the rooftop, which is a simple, calming space with an insane view.
Here, I wanted to make a powerful statement and asked our landscaper to bring in blue agaves to line the ledge of our roof. He did, and they were fine, but they didn’t have the dramatic impact I wanted. “Mas grande, mas grande, mas grande!” I probably sounded like a broken record. “Summer, you can’t get these any bigger,” they told me.
I described pictures I’d seen of fields with huge agaves. This is the type of plant you use for tequila, so I knew they were in high demand, but as I’ve said before, in Mexico, people really don’t like to say no!
A week later, I had 30 massive agaves! I love the way they look—that repetitive, simplicity of giant sculptural plants. I’m very proud of it, and I’m proud we got the bigger ones.
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