Hotel Sevilla: Grupo Habita Unveils Their Newest Gem

By Tansy Kaschak on 12.09.25

For 25 years, Grupo Habita has been shaping Mexican (but not only) creative hospitality, often adding a substantial layer to the way we experience their destinations. From the shores of Oaxaca to New York’s Chelsea, they’ve turned hotels into cultural barometers and carefully architected creative salons. Their projects have always been here to immerse us, recalibrate our senses, and leave us with a slightly altered idea of what hospitality can be.

So when the group arrived in Mérida, in Mexico’s Yucatán, and laid eyes on a crumbling 16th-century hacienda steps from Plaza Grande, they envisioned a whole narrative potential. They saw a building waiting to be re-read, reactivated, and reintroduced to a contemporary audience not only through the restoration of aesthetics alone, but of spirit. And this is how, seven years ago, the dream of Hotel Sevilla was born.

A Dialogue in Time

Built in the 16th-century as a private residence before later being transformed into a hotel, the corner plot hacienda is a landmark monument close to the Mérida’s historic center’s main square. The building’s colonial façade stayed almost exactly as it was — a quiet bow to continuity — while the interior tells a story of careful excavation. Stone floors resurfaced, tropical wood ceilings uncovered, patinaed walls left with their history intact. It’s an architectural archaeology, executed with tenderness.

Into this context, under the guidance of Moisés Micha and Carlos Cotourier, Grupo Habita’s founders and creative masterminds, architects Zeller & Moye (based between Berlin and Mexico City) and Salomón Sacal inscribed a new language: sweeping concrete forms, a sculptural spiral staircase, and a pool carved with the precision of a line drawing. Rather than blending eras, Sevilla pits them against each other just enough for sparks to fly. The result is not nostalgia, nor futurism, but a kind of temporal duet.

Quiet Luxury, Yucatán Style

The 21 rooms feel like minimalist contemplative chambers, but softened by craft. Black ceramic floors reference local homes; henequen textiles nod to the region’s ancestral production; modernist silhouettes sit alongside shutters that have seen centuries.

Even the tech bends toward culture: each room’s screen loops a curated guide to Mérida’s museums, galleries, and independent spaces, effectively turning the hotel into a portal to the city’s creative fabric. A QR code reveals the house playlist, because Grupo Habita has always understood that sound is part of spatial experience.

F&B and Wellness as Intimacy and Ritual

In the courtyard, four almond trees stand like natural guardians over the cantina, where sunlight, shade, and conversation trade places throughout the day. Upstairs, the 24-seat bistrót, led by Chef Marion Chateau, cooks in a rhythm that mirrors the city’s markets. Her French-Mexican menu is improvisational in the best way: grounded in produce, shaped by intuition, and designed for intimacy.

At the bar, the cocktails lean into mezcal and tequila, but always with Habita’s intentional trademark restraint.

Out back, where horses once slept, now sits a small but soul-forward spa. The Tuj (Mayan sauna) and cold plunge form the core of the experience, offered in private or community sessions. Guests can deepen the ritual with a DIY kit — sea salt scrub, local mud, herbal infusion — a reminder that wellness in Yucatán has always been rooted in earth, water, and heat.

One block from Plaza Grande and yet somehow a world away, Hotel Sevilla is where past and present meet at eye level. A place where textures tell stories, where architecture is emotion, and where the rhythm of Mérida is experienced as a lived moment.

Once again, with the opening of a new hotel — they now count 15 hotels in Mexico and one in Chicago, USA — Grupo Habita has shifted a city’s cultural conversation while they continue to do something that is akin to a miracle in hospitality: expand without losing their essence. And their elegant, understated and genuine way of doing it all is something the whole industry can take note of.

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