Hotel Tiki Tiki Tulum

Somewhere between glamorous excess and spartan backpackers’ minimalism is the Mayan Riviera town of Tulum. More concretely, it’s just down the coast from Playa del Carmen, on the less developed end of the Riviera Maya. And while the coastal hotel zone is where most of the hotels are — you’ve got to admire the clarity of that logic — the western edge of the town center, two miles inland from the beach, is where you’ll find the low-key, affordable, and charmingly mid-century modernist Hotel Tiki Tiki Tulum.

Here, of course, “inland” connotes a jungle-scape in vibrant shocks of green. Totaling just 15 rooms, Tiki Tiki feels as much like a Miami apartment building as it does a boutique hotel, due in no small part to the sizable rooms, the courtyard pool, glass-block windows, perforated surfaces, slatted wood, and a steady diet of blues and greens colluding towards a rewarding aesthetic eyeful. Of course some rooms come with indoor hammocks, the better to idly thumb through a paperback while drinking in the patterned tilework and floods of equatorial light.

An auxiliary benefit of Tiki Tiki’s modest size comes in the attentive, dedicated service in the public spaces. No restaurant (Tulum’s hardly lacking), but the delightfully tropical bar makes for perfect poolside lounging, slinging wickedly fresh cocktails to guests in a pitch-perfect handful of dyed-wicker, splay-legged furnishings. It’s all very relaxed and unhurried. One could get used to this sort of thing.