'What I look for is people who love people. Everyone on my team has to exude warmth, creativity and love.’ This isn’t a woolly echo of the Apostle Paul, but the guiding mantra of Kevin Wendle, the man behind Hotel Esencia.
Esencia, a 47-suite hotel, is nestled in 50 acres of Mexican jungle that runs down to a secluded beach. At either end, the beach is guarded by coral promontories, where rays and tropical fish swim and manatees are frequent visitors. It is a spot of serenity on Mexico’s Riviera Maya, only an hour or so from Cancun International Airport, in a region otherwise known for its all-inclusive resorts, where room numbers often run into the thousands.
Hotel Esencia regularly appears in lists such as The World’s 50 Best Hotels — in 2023, it was number 19 — and holds three Michelin Keys, an accolade that signals something close to hotel nirvana.
This level of recognition makes Wendle’s approach even more striking. To reach such a pinnacle normally requires a team in the mould of the SAS: unnervingly competent, efficient and ruthlessly trained. ‘Before I opened Esencia, I booked into 25 hotels in the region — from beach shacks to mega resorts. Even at the best ones, I felt that the service was somewhat robotic.’ Esencia’s familial approach is refreshing — and it is an ocean away from corporate training manuals and human-resource diktats.
Waking up here on your first morning does, indeed, feel like waking up at the home of an old friend, albeit an especially luxurious one. On the balcony of your room, you’ll find a lock box. Inside, there’s a basket of buttery pastries, a flask of fortifying coffee and another of Mexican hot chocolate; a thick, irresistible blend of cacao, cinnamon, vanilla and a touch of chilli.
I travelled with my wife and our three-year-old daughter and there was a daily battle with the toddler over who was going to get a refill of this sweet elixir. Next to these breakfast treats is a little note explaining why the basket is left under lock and key: ‘So our wild friends don’t steal it.’
At the clatter of cups, a gaggle of Yucatan jays — head to toe in an iridescent sapphire livery and much more elegant than their European cousins — and great-tailed grackles appeared on the surrounding branches. A couple of pygmy raccoons poked their snouts through the palapa thatch of the roof, hoping for scraps. The journey from Cancun — the busiest airport in Latin America — and down the bustling coast road was quickly forgotten amid the tree tops and sound of Caribbean waves.
The Riviera Maya is part of the wider Yucatan peninsula. This sliver of land has more than 1,200 miles of coast and stretches from the Gulf of Mexico in the north to the border with Belize in the south. It is a land of extraordinary natural wonder. Near the north is the Chicxulub crater, the site of the asteroid strike that saw off the dinosaurs. Moments from Esencia is the Sian Ka’an Biosphere, a UNESCO Heritage Site with world-class birding, diving and fly-fishing.
At every turn, you’ll find another cenote — a sinkhole filled with fresh water, caused when the limestone bedrock collapses into the groundwater beneath. These pools were considered portals to the underworld by the Mayans and used for sacred rituals, especially sacrifices. Cenotes are often connected to the nearby ocean by an underground river, and provide that important habitat where sweet-and saltwater meet.
Closer to the hotel, a brackish lagoon winds through mangroves. One evening, we paddleboarded through its narrow channels, ducking beneath low branches before slipping into the water with snorkels and letting the current carry us back towards the sea. Colourful fish swam, unbothered, beneath us and baby tarpon splashed in the knotted mangroves as we passed.
Despite the cultural and ecological abundance beyond its borders, the challenge for the hotel is persuading its guests to leave ‘my little patch of paradise’, as Wendle calls it. I’ve always seen hotels as somewhere to lay my head and a springboard into exploring the local area, yet, after a few hours at Esencia, I embraced the first hot beach holiday I’ve ever had (I’m more used to the remote and chillier sands of the Hebrides or Donegal).
The antidote to a Mezcal tasting on our first evening was sunrise yoga overlooking the ocean for my wife and a visit to the spa for me. I’m not one for spending hours in sterile treatment rooms, but I was converted by the Esencia spa, a cathedral to wellbeing, constructed out of Mayan materials. The incense and oils are made on site using ingredients from the hotel’s herb garden.
There are three small restaurants, but we mostly chose to dine among the trees of the jungle or next to the sea. To our shaded cabana on the sand, devastatingly good margaritas and locally caught ceviche appeared with wondrous regularity. No request was too much and no outcrop near the surf too distant to set a table.
The hotel employs more than 250 people, ensuring no detail is left unrefined. One member of the team is Juan Carlos Gutiérrez. Once a lead graphic designer for Chanel, Gutiérrez arrived to help Wendle with a design project, and never left. He is now his full-time artistic director. This is not a usual employee for a hotel, but that flair for design, from logos to menus to planning lavish private parties, is one of the things that makes Esencia so special. The hotel’s style has even been the subject of a glossy coffee-table book, produced by the king of design-led publishers, Assouline.
Esencia started life not as a hotel, but as the hedonistic hideaway of Rosa de Ferrari, an Italian duchess. She later opened it to guests with the help of a handful of investors. When Wendle first laid eyes on it, it was down at heel and loss making, ‘run by a committee and without a singular vision. But it did have the best lick of beach in the area and buildings that shone with old-world glamour. If I couldn’t turn it around,’ he recalls, ‘I figured I’d make it my home and occasionally rent it out.’
The hotel now has cult status, with a troop of cus-tomers that reads like the guest list at an Oscars after party — quite fitting considering Wendle started his career as a producer in Hollywood.
He never attended a hotel school in Switzerland or studied hospitality. He honed his craft by visiting hotels and falling in love with design and architecture. Esencia is that rare thing, a truly independent hotel operated, not by men studying spreadsheets in an office, but by a visionary on the ground. It is precisely because his mantra doesn’t align with corporate busybodies that his guests genuinely do feel treated with ‘warmth, creativity and love’. That, and the procession of margaritas that sees in each evening.
Rooms at Hotel Esencia start from $1,059 (about £788) per night, excluding taxes.
This feature originally appeared in the October 14, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'