Some of the Playa’s resort-style indoor/outdoor residences, funded along with two other
financial partners, are for sale, and a few are
occasionally rented to prospective buyers who,
with the help of a concierge, can get a sense
of the area and the luxurious, spacious homes.
For instance, a million-dollar one-bedroom
residence is as big as a multibedroom home in
the Bay Area, at 3,000 square feet. Even larger
Playa residences have up to four bedrooms.
The interiors, some by Canadian architect
Alex Chapman and others by Paulina Gutierrez
of San Jose del Cabo, are modern, with state-of-the-art Viking kitchens, marble bathrooms
and beautiful furnishings, some by local crafts-men. A freestanding poolside gym, located
close to a bronze anchor sculpture by Octavio
Gonzalez, is open all the time. What’s not
easily visible are the desalination plant, which
makes seawater in Playa’s taps safer than bottled water, and powerful generators that kick in
when electricity flags during a storm.
The surrounding desert landscape is dotted
with cactus and acacia, yet the browned backdrop
of El Mirador hills turns green after the smallest
downpour, and that verdure lines the panoramic
road from Playa to the center of La Paz.
Although Baja has been inhabited for millennia, La Paz is a 16th-century creation fueled in
part by pearl fishing. The sea, as with all coastal
towns, is still its beating heart. A whale museum
reverentially displays a whale skeleton in its
side yard, and more of Gonzalez’s sea-inspired
bronzes of mermaids, breaching whales and even
a manta ray in flight grace the Malecón. Jardin
Velasco, a square in the center of town in front of
the 1861 Dominican Catedral de Nuestra Señora
de la Paz, built on the site of an 18th-century
Jesuit mission, has a fountain contoured like a
mushroom-shaped rock in the Sea of Cortez, a
symbolic nod to La Paz’s best asset, the sea.
Curtiss loves all that, he says, but when it
comes to new buildings, he wants Playa de la Paz
to clear a path that goes “well beyond the box.”
playadelapaz.com. n
“Five of the world’s eight
species of sea turtles,
endangered porpoises,
and giant 30-foot-long
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