Ten Plus Three Architect Mauricio Lobeira and Partner Mauricio de la Garza Design a Remarkable House and Gardens in Monterrey
Casa Camouflage — Blending Seamlessly Into The Lush Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains of Mexico
BY Rebecca Sherman // 01.31.25A floating wall creates a focal point in the open living area, with an Edelmiro Rangel painting, Dante — Goods and Bads sofa from Garde, John Hutton Collections black velvet armchair, pair of Christian Liaigre lounge chairs, and a vintage fur chair from Forty Five Ten. Allan Knight Lucite coffee table and found stools. Sconce by Promemoria. Sculpture on pedestal by Raúl Cerrillo. Collection of Indonesian martaban jars from La Bodega de Mauricio Jasso, Monterrey. Rug designed by Ten Plus Three. (Photo by Douglas Friedman)
In 2015, architect Mauricio Lobeira had a choice to make. “I had in my mind that I would either build a house or buy an apartment in Monterrey,” he says of his hometown in the northeastern state of Nuevo León, Mexico. Lobeira, Gonzalo Bueno, and Victoria Rubíes co-founded the architecture and design firm Ten Plus Three, which has offices in Monterrey and Dallas, where Lobeira’s son is a business major at SMU.
One day while meeting a client in Monterrey’s elegant San Pedro Garza García enclave, Lobeira spotted an unbuilt lot with magnificent trees and a rippling stream. “I was mesmerized; something like this is very rare in Monterrey,” he says.
Finding the entrance gate locked, he climbed over to get a better look. The terrain was sloped and oddly configured, but it was bordered by a forested park, an outgrowth of a nearby ecological reserve in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range. The spectacular view seemed to blend with the property, making it appear much larger and more lush.

(Photo by Douglas Friedman)
“I was super, super in love with all of it,” Lobeira says. After doing some research, he discovered the land was owned by an old friend of his father, who agreed to sell.
The land was the perfect spot for Lobeira to build a house for his family — he has two children from a previous marriage and a life partner, Mauricio de la Garza — but it was a risky time to put down roots in Mexico. Volatile elections that summer had created an uncertain political climate, so the couple proceeded with the house slowly and in stages, over many years. De la Garza, who is founder and head designer of the landscape architecture firm Dornato, began work on the gardens and hardscape first, a project that took 11 months.
The gardens embrace the idea of borrowed scenery — or shakkei, an ancient East Asian design technique that incorporates a distant view into the garden’s composition. “We wanted to bring in the lushness of the greenery of the park, so I asked Mauricio to design a garden that is more jungle-like with tropical plants with many different textures and sizes of leaves,” Lobeira says. Giant white birds of paradise, Egyptian papyrus, temple trees, Arabian jasmine, and delicate maidenhair and silver lady ferns all thrive amid a microclimate generated by the stream that runs through the property. Massive boulders and river rocks create a retaining wall, and a raised swimming pool surrounded by greenery has the effect of a grand water feature.

Architecture styles in the Nuevo León capital of Monterrey are a striking mix of history and modernity, from Bishop’s Palace, an 18th-century Spanish colonial mansion done in the Baroque style, to Luis Barragán’s Lighthouse of Commerce, a towering red monument built in 1984. Tadao Ando’s stunning contemporary hacienda, Casa Monterrey, is built from concrete and glass and nestles into a hillside overlooking the city.
For his own house, Lobeira looked to Scandinavia’s iconic A-frame holiday cabins. Often clad in black oxidized zinc and steel, such structures are designed to blend into the surrounding forest. “The idea came to me to design an urban cabin,” Lobeira says. “The two-story A-frame house is a familiar shape to the eye; it’s very simple but with proportions that you can do wonders with.”
The straightforward architecture style is contrasted with complex materials, textures, and colors traditional to Mexican culture, such as the exterior’s Cantera Negra de Galindo limestone, quarried in central Mexico. Lobeira chose the stone because the unusually dark color integrates naturally with the deep greens of the surrounding forest. “The house becomes more like a shadow than a shape,” he says.
The limestone’s vertical pattern, which Lobeira designed, took inspiration from ancient Aztec stelae, or stone monuments. It took two years for local artisans to cut and carve each piece by hand on-site.

Inside, a broad sweep of open space envelops a living room, bar, dining room, and stairway leading to bedrooms. “The entirety of the space is connected by a wood ceiling,” Lobeira says. “The only division is a singular floating wall in the entry to achieve a sense of surprise when you walk around it.” Handmade wood beams from Northern Mexico were designed by the architect to impart an “imperfect, naive feel that brings the formality down. People loosen up when they come in.”
Lobeira abhors wasted space, so he devised a floor plan entirely without hallways. “It was hard, but it was most important that we live in every inch of the house,” he says. The interiors’ masterful flujo continuo — Spanish for seamless flow — creates an elegant transition from room to room. Lobeira accomplishes this through the use of consistent materials such as textural Élitis wallpaper from France, wood plank floors, and beams. A warm color palette throughout focuses on masculine browns, grays, and taupes. To reduce distractions, doors are clad in the same materials as the walls, including brown mirror.

Lobeira has furnished the house with custom pieces of his own design, along with others he’s owned for decades. “We see things as they come to market, and if I think they might work, I buy. Many of these pieces have been with me 25, 30 years,” he says. Seating has been reupholstered as needed and furniture arranged by harmonizing shapes, textures, and styles. “Everything I own seems to go together,” he says. The collection is an idiosyncratic mix of furnishings by mostly European designers — Christian Liaigre, Poliform, Promemoria, Modénature, Walter Knoll. He recently fell in love with a contemporary sofa by German company Dante – Goods and Bads featuring a curved and ruched back that reminds him of a conch shell.

Lobeira gravitates to the unusual and exotic, such as a pair of turtleshell wall sconces by Douglas Little and one-off vintage fur chairs from Forty Five Ten. An old floor lamp once used in theaters was purchased at Paul Bert Serpette antiques market in Paris, and Lobeira picked up a rustic 16th-century Peruvian desk from La Bodega, an antiques store located in a former sweets factory in his neighborhood. A set of five rustic wood stools — a lucky street find — is artfully arranged next to an iron-and-glass coffee table of his own design.
The interiors are energized by art and objects, including taxidermy mounts that once belonged to Lobeira’s father, an avid big-game hunter. Much of Lobeira’s art collection is by Mexican artists, including noted sculptor Héctor Zamora, whose works are featured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Hirshhorn collection in Washington, D.C. A large floor sculpture by Tezontle Studio incorporates red volcanic stone used by the Aztecs to make sculptures and calendar stones, and muralist Priscila Gonzalez Urrea was commissioned to paint a jungle scene on all wall in their main bedroom.

In one sitting area, there’s a remarkable example of functional art: a full-size leather door surrounded by a massive ceramic frame, made in the early 1980s by artists Jean and Françoise Ledru in their Paris workshop. Lobeira discovered the piece through antiques dealers Henri Pelazzo and Corinne Lexcellent, who have a shop at Paul Bert Serpette.
Whenever they are in Monterrey, Lobeira and de la Garza make a point of meeting at home for lunch. “The dining room is surrounded by big windows, so it’s super inviting,” Lobeira says. The house was designed for entertaining. “We love to have people around,” Lobeira says. “We have incredible dinner parties or luncheons in the pool house, where we have banquettes that seat 40 at the table.”
Mi casa es su casa is a way of living here. “This is a welcoming house — it hugs you and invites you to stay.”