By: Lucas Raven
Aman opens its first Mexican outpost on Baja’s East Cape, and a certain kind of traveler exhales for the first time in years.
There is a particular species of man — you will know him by his linen, his practiced indifference to Wi-Fi passwords, and the way he says “I just need somewhere quiet” as though quiet were a rare mineral he alone has the palate to appreciate — for whom the opening of a new Aman is not so much travel news as a change in the weather. Something shifts. Flights get looked into. A carry-on, already half-packed for a trip that does not yet exist, is quietly zipped shut.
So it is worth sitting up for the arrival of Amanvari, the brand’s first Mexican property, which has just opened along Baja California Sur’s East Cape — that stretch of coastline where the Sea of Cortés meets the desert with the sort of drama usually reserved for divorce settlements. Eighteen casitas. A name stitched together from the Sanskrit for “peace” and “water.” A Chairman, Vlad Doronin, given to sentences like “Amanvari establishes a new benchmark for hospitality,” which is the sort of thing chairmen say, and which is, on this occasion, probably not wrong.
The Setting, Which Is Doing Most of the Work
Let’s be honest: any resort fortunate enough to be wedged between the Sierra de la Laguna mountains, an estuary, and three miles of swimmable beachfront within a 1,500-acre private community is already coasting on a very good hand. Amanvari, to its credit, appears to know this, and has mostly gotten out of the landscape’s way. The architects — Elastic Architects, working from an initial concept by Heah & Co. — have built the whole thing as a kind of slow-release architectural sentence, tracing a single path from arrival to a central lagoon and then, finally, to the sand.
The eighteen standalone casitas themselves are positioned with the sort of privacy usually associated with witness protection: some raised above the estuary, others tucked closer to shore, each roughly 82 square metres with terraces stretching up to 200 — big enough, one imagines, to lose a spouse in comfortably. There’s a ten-metre heated pool per casita, an outdoor shower, an outdoor fireplace, and walls of fair-faced white concrete applied, we’re told, by hand, by master artisans, which is a sentence designed to make you feel slightly guilty about your own bathroom renovation.
The Business of Not Doing Anything, Beautifully
At the Aman Spa and Wellness Centre, the brand has reached for something more ambitious than the usual hot-stone-and-whale-song formula: a contemporary reimagining of the temazcal, the traditional sweat lodge, done here for the first time in Aman’s history, alongside a banya, a hammam, and six treatment rooms in which one can be gently disassembled and reassembled by professionals. There is also a 24-hour gym, should the desert air inspire delusions of discipline, and an open-air yoga pavilion for those mornings when discipline briefly wins.
For anyone whose idea of relaxation requires forward motion, there’s horseback riding across desert and coastline, private-boat excursions to the coral reefs of Cabo Pulmo National Marine Park, seasonal whale watching, and — because this is still, technically, a resort community and not a monastery — an 18-acre organic farm, a Robert Trent Jones II golf course, and a marina for those who arrived by yacht and would rather everyone knew it.
Dinner, Served Four Ways and Without Apology
Amanvari’s culinary programme reads like a passport with very good taste. Luma handles the Baja coast in earnest, open-fire and elemental, using produce that has, per the release, been “purveyed” — a verb doing quite a lot of heavy lifting — from local farms and fisheries. Arva turns Italian, communal and unfussy in the way only very expensive Italian food is allowed to be. Sesui goes fully Japanese, with a ten-seat omakase counter for those wanting theatre with their dinner, and a quieter dining room for those who would simply like the fish. And for anyone whose ambitions extend no further than a sunset and a good pour, there’s the Lounge Bar and a spot simply called The Pool, which is either refreshingly literal or the most Aman name imaginable — possibly both.
For the Committed
Should a week ever start to feel insufficient — and at some Amans, mysteriously, it does — there is also a collection of Aman-branded residences on offer, for travelers who have made peace with the idea that renting was only ever a phase. It’s a familiar move for the brand, and part of a broader expansion push that will soon add Aman Miami Beach, Aman Beverly Hills, Amancaya in the Bahamas’ Exuma Islands, and Amansanu in Texas Hill Country to the map — proof that “peace and privacy,” as a business model, is scaling rather nicely.
