Instead of opting for the more traditional tin, Bowman had star lights custom-made in copper and hung dozens from the ceiling of the garden room. A 19th-century window surround was turned into a mantelpiece. Ralph Lauren Home sofas. Donghia cushion fabric on Sutherland armchairs.
Fate has a funny way of waltzing into Peter Roy Bowman's world and forcing a serious change of plans.
When he and his wife, Tari, first visited Puerto Vallarta back in 1981, a local business owner casually offered to sell the couple his beachfront restaurant. The Bowmans shocked their friends, not to mention themselves, by taking him up on it, uprooting their family from Northern California and becoming, in an instant, expatriate restaurateurs. Later, when Bowman—who trained as an architect in San Francisco—began to take on design projects here and there, he found that he didn't have enough room to store all of the antiques, artworks and furnishings he was buying. His office soon filled up with them, as did a nearby warehouse. "One thing led to another," he says, "until I figured, why don't we just open up a store?" Without ever really intending to, he became a shop owner.
A recent project followed the same fortuitous trajectory. The clients had once stayed at a property designed by Bowman; they had admired his style enough that they ordered some items from his store, Banderas Bay Trading Company, upon returning home to the United States. When they purchased a house of their own in Punta Mita, just north of Puerto Vallarta, they called Bowman—whom they'd never met face-to-face—and asked him to help them renovate. "We met and kept meeting and kept coming up with more and more ideas," he says. The brief grew more ambitious. Then, says Bowman, the demolition phase revealed that the residence, though new, wasn't especially well constructed. The clients politely asked Bowman if he might "tear the house down and start over from scratch," he says. Once again, fate intervened and turned a relatively modest endeavor into a major one.
In their discussions, Bowman and his clients, along with architects Guillermo Michel Renteria and Alvaro Gomez Flores, agreed that their biggest challenge would be to create a space that could accommodate their ever-expanding collection of Mexican art, furniture and antiques without seeming like a folk art museum. The result is what Bowman calls "a contemporary hacienda," one in which "the architecture is very simple but with wonderful details. Every room opens to a patio where we have fountains and other wonderful things happening." Bowman likes to surprise—with breathtaking lighting and fountain displays, or with stately antiques that function as a time machine, transporting one back to the era when Mexico, newly independent from Spain, was setting about building its own empire.
From the outset, designer Peter Roy Bowman collaborated closely with architects Guillermo Michel Renteria and Alvaro Gomez Flores on the plans for a couple's oceanfront retreat in Punta Mita, Mexico. Landscape designer Jean Philippe Armenta Comin was responsible for the property's lushly planted grounds.
Bowman and the clients "started shopping right away," he says, "and concentrated on finding architectural details. We'd buy a surround here, a door there." The sculptural 19th-century front doors are from a residence in Mexico City.
Bill Megrail's Tropical con Flores is above the living room fireplace. The mantelpiece was conceived by the designer and incorporates a pair of antique stone eagles mounted on contemporary columns. "It's incredible working with the craftsmen here," he notes.
In the dining room, as throughout, Bowman mixed formal European-style pieces with traditional Central and South American furnishings. At rear is El Otro Lado, 2005, by Alejandro Mondría Hiber. The client suggested the design for the tiles that line a fountain; they were used for the pool as well.
The Pacific is beyond. Summit lounge chairs.
"When you have a lot like this, you're going to orient it to the water," Bowman remarks. Shallow stairs lead to the infinity pool.
Another work by Mondría Hiber, El Beso, 2005, is in the master bedroom.
Bowman's eye for antiques and furnishings has made his design practice, like his store, a tremendous success. Without question, that same discerning eye was at work here: in a guest room, where an 18th-century pine altarpiece serves as a unique headboard; in the garden room, where the sinuous lines of a mantelpiece, conjured from a 19th-century Cantera stone window surround, suggest the link between Mexico's postcolonial and pre-Columbian artistic traditions; and even at the entrance, where a pair of truly imposing 12-foot-high carved wood doors that worked so hard securing a Mexico City mansion back in the 19th century are now enjoying their well-deserved retirement, opening up frequently to let in the clear light and ocean breeze.
But Bowman's other gift is for color, and he knows that in moving to Mexico, he's come to the right place. Back when he and his family lived in the Bay Area, he painted his house bright blue and red, "much to the horror of the other people on the block," he readily admits. And while he has nothing against earth tones, per se, "they don't work down here," he says. Bowman has given his clients a variety of vividly colored, highly textured surfaces: walls treated like canvas, marked by a painterly, almost impressionistic brushwork; brilliantly hued tiles imported from the state of Puebla, renowned for its centuries-old glazing tradition; the weathered wood frames of a pair of 19th-century armchairs—beyond what might fashionably be called "distressed," proudly letting their successive layers of paint show through. "Americans tend to be a little too timid about color," he says, graciously refusing to single out his ex-neighbors.
Bowman thinks that this house may be his last big design project. Not long ago he came to the realization that his store was no longer large enough to hold the treasures that he keeps finding all over his adopted country; he had to open an annex down the street to contain the overflow. "We were lucky that we got to do things on this project that I never thought I'd get to do," he says, citing the airplane rides and other treats—like wishing aloud for a very particular type of date palm tree for the courtyard, then having the client give the green light to have it shipped down from Cabo San Lucas on the next available boat. "But now I want to devote my days to playing in the store," he says.
It's such a peaceful image: collecting beautiful pieces, chatting about them with customers, selling them to those whom one knows will truly appreciate them. Whether fate will allow Peter Roy Bowman to keep still for very long is a different matter altogether.