Welcome to the jungle

Tyler Polich and Jessica Jimenez Keenan of Years craft a home for a young family seeking a closer connection to nature in Costa Rica

- MAYER RUS

Rainy season in Nosara, Costa Rica, stretches for seven months. The climate, with its inexorable humidity and salt air, wreaks havoc on building materials and quotidian staples like rugs and books. Termites and ants are constantly on the march, and the power grid occasionally goes down. Reshma Patel and her husband, Christian Rudder, a cofounder of the online dating site OkCupid, know all about the struggle. In 2020, the couple decamped from New York City to Costa Rica with their daughter, Plum, for what was initially meant to be a one-year sojourn. But the Edenic landscape proved irresistible, and the family decided to put down roots. “We wanted to learn how to live in harmony with nature, so we decided that we were going to be okay with the ants and power outages and all the rest,” Patel says. “It’s a really brave thing to build a home in the jungle,” she adds. “You can try to keep it at bay, but the jungle always finds a way in.”

To realize their vision of equatorial domestic bliss, Patel and Rudder engaged Tyler Polich and Jessica Jimenez Keenan of the recently launched Los Angeles design studio Years, along with local architect Jean Andre Garnier of Garnier Arquitectos. Polich (whose résumé includes the AD100 firms Diller Scofidio + Renfro, The Archers, and Bjarke Ingels Group) and Jimenez Keenan (an alumna of Elizabeth Roberts Architects and Studio Shamshiri) originally met the homeowners in New York while working on projects for Patel’s erstwhile Williamsburg jewelry boutique Quiet Storms. “We immediately clicked with Tyler and Jessica, and we wanted to carry forward all the trust and fun we had,” Patel recalls.