This article originally appeared in the November 2013 issue of Architectural Digest.

Every house tells a story, and in Los Cabos, on the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja peninsula, a pair of vacation homes stand side by side as a testament to a remarkable friendship—the one that George Clooney shares with Rande Gerber and his wife, Cindy Crawford. The name of this compound, Casamigos—or House of Friends—says it all. “We’ve been hanging out for 20-something years,” says Gerber, a nightlife entrepreneur who now focuses on his tequila-and-rum company, Gerber Spirits. “Long before the houses were built, we would travel to Baja together, staying at different hotels and drinking tequila.”

The idea of planting a flag in Los Cabos came several years ago while the two men were there on vacation with a few friends. “We saw this oceanfront lot and thought maybe it made sense to build something,” Gerber says. It was a desire fueled by wanting a place where family and friends could come together comfortably. “Once we had kids, we would go on vacation at Christmas,” says Crawford. “But you’d have to book hotels a year in advance, and then you’d get there and they never quite lived up to expectations.” Plus, Los Cabos is a short flight from Los Angeles, making it a convenient getaway for Clooney, whose primary home is in Studio City, and for Crawford and Gerber, who live in Malibu most of the year with their school-age son and daughter.

Initially the trio thought of creating one house large enough for everyone, but that concept was eventually nixed in favor of two independent structures. “It’s just nice at the end of the night to have your own place to go back to,” Gerber says. Even so, the houses are basically used as a single home, with overflow from one accommodated by the other, and meals and other activities frequently split between the two. “Our lives go back and forth,” Crawford says. “We’ll have cocktails at our place and dinner at George’s, and vice versa.”

The two homes were designed and built in tandem, and Clooney happily allowed Gerber and Crawford to take the lead on the project, knowing he could trust their taste implicitly. “Rande has this amazing eye for houses and style,” says Clooney, who nonetheless was a regular presence at meetings and traveled to the site every couple of weeks to give input. “I wanted something that would blend in,” he notes, “something indigenous that would feel in harmony with the setting.”