A nineteenth-century casa particular in Mérida's historic centro, with its colonnaded courtyard of white-painted arches and palm-planted interior garden, provides the structural armature for Decu Downtown — and the conversion keeps that colonial bones deliberately legible. The checkerboard courtyard ground, laid in alternating squares of pale gravel and black volcanic stone, introduces a graphic contemporary gesture against the building's original arcade of slender columns and louvered mahogany doors, a contrast that sets the hotel's governing tension in a single image. The interiors work through material restraint rather than period recreation. Guest rooms are finished in trowelled lime plaster left to weather and mottle into amber and cream, the walls carrying the texture of the original structure without pretending to restoration. Platform beds in warm oak sit on floors that shift register between rooms — original encaustic cement tiles with cobalt floral patterns in some, sage-green ceramic squares in others — while pendant lamps in hand-blown glass supply the only decorative weight. The restaurant animates the same vocabulary at larger scale: black marble table tops on cast-iron bases, oak armchairs with a silhouette close to Hans Wegner's Round Chair, and slatted timber screens that fold open toward a light-washed inner courtyard. At the pool terrace, a raw limestone staircase climbs a pebble-mosaic wall beneath a timber-slatted canopy, the arched bathroom opening mirroring the colonial arcade on the opposite side of the property.

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