We Built It For This

It Was Never Really About Building the Villa

A few years ago, we left our old life behind and came to the mountains of Oaxaca with a fairly simple idea.

We wanted to live differently.

More slowly. More intentionally. More closely connected to the land beneath our feet.

When we arrived, there wasn’t much here to suggest the life we imagined.

There was raw land, steep slopes, dry soil, trees and brush, and a whole lot to figure out.

Over the years, we’ve cleared areas for fire safety, worked to slow soil erosion, planted trees and gardens, learned how to work with this particular piece of land and built… often with our own hands, the things we needed along the way.

Little by little, the landscape began to change and soften.

And so did we.

Somewhere in all that work, the idea of a sanctuary began to take shape.

At first, I think we imagined it mostly as something we were creating for ourselves. It was a feeling vs a vision we were after. A place to live, to work, to grow food, to gather, and eventually to share with others.

But there was another hope underneath it all.

We wanted our children to have a place here too.

A home away from home.

A place they could return to again and again… even though this was not the place where they grew up.

For years, that was just an idea.

This week, it became real.

The villa isn’t finished.

Not even close, actually.

There are still things we want to change and things we haven’t gotten around to doing. The bathroom isn’t complete. Eventually, we’ll extend the palm roof over the front so there is more protection from the heavy rains. There are details to finish, decisions still to make, and plenty of work waiting for us.

But somewhere along the way, I realized that “finished” wasn’t actually the point.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years feeling like we were working toward something.

Toward the next stage.

The next garden.

The next building.

The next improvement.

The next thing that would make the land feel a little more settled and the life we imagined a little more complete.

And there is a strange trap that exists within that.

When you’re always working toward the finished thing, you often miss the moment when the thing you’ve been building is already enough to experience.

We’ve been learning that slowly here.

This life isn’t about reaching a finish line.

It’s about becoming devoted to the process.

The villa reminded me of that once again.

Even something as ordinary as choosing windows became part of the conversation we keep having with this place.

Here, windows and doors aren’t something you simply pick up off a shelf. They’re made to order, and traditionally they’re made without screens.

That works beautifully for a certain way of building, but it wasn’t quite right for us.

I wanted the villa to feel open.

I wanted the air to move through it.

I wanted to see the trees and the mountains and feel connected to what was happening outside, without constantly fighting the insects that come with living in a tropical landscape.

So we found our own way of doing it.

Simple screened windows.

Nothing elaborate.

Just enough to allow the building to breathe while still making it comfortable to live in.

And the more I thought about the villa, the more I kept coming back to the same two words.

Open and Spacious. Two words that are as much a feeling as they are an aesthetic.

Open air.

Open views.

Open energy.

I didn’t want to fill it with things simply because there was space to fill.

I wanted the landscape to be part of our home.

The trees.

The light.

The sounds.

The breeze.

The changing colours of the mountains.

The view when you wake up in the morning.

Sometimes building a home is as much about what you leave out as what you put in it.

For so long, we imagined what it would feel like to have our children here.

Not just visiting us.

Not staying for an afternoon.

Actually being here.

Waking up here.

Having coffee with us in the morning.

Going to the beach.

Eating something we had grown.

Sitting around together at the end of the day.

And when our daughter finally arrived, something shifted for me.

The villa stopped being a building we were working on.

It became a home.

Not because we had finished it.

Because someone we love was living in it.

That distinction has stayed with me.

We didn’t suddenly have everything we had imagined.

The villa wasn’t complete.

The landscaping wasn’t complete.

There were still things on our list.

But none of that seemed particularly important when we were sitting together drinking coffee in the morning.

Or harvesting mangoes and limes.

Or heading to the ocean.

Or watching her surf.

Or sitting together as the sun disappeared at the end of the day.

Those were the moments.

Not the finished walls.

Not the windows.

Not the roof.

Not the list of things still waiting to be done.

The moments.

There have been days here when the work has felt enormous.

Days when the land seemed to push back.

Days when something we had carefully built needed to be rebuilt.

Days when progress was so slow that it was hard to see whether we were actually getting anywhere at all.

When you’re in the middle of it, it’s easy to measure progress by what you can point to.

Another wall.

Another garden bed.

Another tree planted.

Another building standing.

Another thing checked off the list.

But I think I’m beginning to understand that the most meaningful progress isn’t always visible.

Sometimes it’s a morning coffee with your daughter.

Sometimes it’s watching someone you love wake up in a place that exists because of years of work you once wondered whether you had the energy to keep doing.

Sometimes it’s sitting together at the ocean and realizing that the life you once imagined in the abstract is happening around you.

Not perfectly.

Not completely.

But here.

I think we sometimes imagine that the reward for building a slower life will be reaching a point where everything is finally finished and we can relax.

I’m not sure that’s how it works.

There’ll always be another garden to plant.

Another wall to repair.

Another season to prepare for.

Another idea that seems worth bringing to life.

The work doesn’t disappear.

What changes is our relationship to it.

We stop seeing the work as something standing between us and the life we want.

The work becomes part of the life.

And maybe that’s what we’ve been learning all along.

We didn’t come here to build a perfect home.

We came here to build a life that felt like ours.

A life with dirt under our fingernails and mangoes ripening in the trees.

A life where the seasons dictate our rhythm.

A life where we make things instead of always buying them.

A life where the land isn’t simply the backdrop to our home, but part of the home itself.

And now, slowly, it’s becoming a place our children can be part of too.

That feels bigger to me than finishing a villa ever could.

Because one day, long after we have forgotten which windows were installed first or which walls took the longest to build, I hope what remains are the memories.

Coffee in the morning.

Salt on our skin after the ocean.

Laughter around the table.

Mangoes picked from the tree.

A daughter surfing while we watched from the shore.

The sun going down over a place that, years ago, was nothing more than raw land.

Maybe this is what we were building toward all along.

Not a finished home.

A place where life could happen.

Maybe this is what we were building toward all along.

Not a finished home.

A place where life could happen.

What are you slowly building in your own life that you're not quite ready to call “finished”?

-Angie