casino no deposit In Mexico City, an Artist Creates a Hidden, Light-Filled Sanctuary
JOSÉ LEÓN CERRILLO never thought he’d live in a French-style turn-of-the-20th-century townhouse. For nearly 15 years, the 48-year-old Mexican artist had rented a boxy midcentury dwelling in Mexico City’s quiet Anzures neighborhood that’d proved the perfect background to his Modernist-leaning geometric installations. After its owner declined to sell the property, Cerrillo spent years looking for something similar. That never materialized, but he did find a mansion on one of the most desirable blocks of the once-bohemian, now-gentrified neighborhood of Roma Norte. “ ‘This is itcasino no deposit,’” he recalls thinking, “even though it was antithetical to what I’d had in mind, from the period to the area.”
The townhouse was designed around 1913 by José G. de la Lama, one of many properties that the architect and developer built in the so-called Porfirian style, named for the Francophile dictator Porfirio Díaz, whose taste, like that of the country’s elite, had been informed by Paris. And yet, behind the facade’s ornate corbels and garlands, de la Lama also incorporated features that urbane Mexicans expected at the time: The three-story, 5,700-square-foot building goes deep into its plot, with a triple-height atrium separating its front half, which contained its primary rooms, from what were once service areas in the back section.
ImageIn the library, metal chain butaque chairs, a 1990s wool rug from Tamacani, a coffee table by Ricardo Legorreta, a wooden bench with a Josef Frank fabric-covered cushion and a Tahiti lamp by Ettore Sottsass for Memphis.Credit...Ana TopoleanuImageThe glass vent over the stove is fashioned after the one in Lina Bo Bardi’s Casa de Vidro.Credit...Ana TopoleanuThe former central courtyard, covered with a glass roof after the house was damaged by Mexico’s 1985 earthquake, was ultimately what convinced Cerrillo to buy the place — he loved how it flooded the interior with natural light, providing an ideal setting for his collection of tropical plants. That its previous owner was a fellow artist, the painter José García Ocejo, who’d lived there from 1970 until his death in 2019, was also appealing. But Ocejo had allowed parts to become run-down, and he had crowded others with dated details like wrought-iron balustrades, wood paneling and wall-to-wall carpeting. Cerrillo, who lives alone with his cat, knew that he’d have to strip the place to its bones, which he did with the help of Max von Werz, a 47-year-old architect who’s become known for his sensitive adaptations of heritage buildings since establishing his Mexico City practice a decade ago. After gutting it, the two men began designing their own mazelike Rubik’s Cube, filling a dozen or so areas across three floors on all sides of the atrium with an assortment of semi-enclosed sitting rooms, two bedrooms and other gathering places, some separated by French doors. “I can see the whole space from any given corner,” Cerrillo says. “It’s a huge house, but you can take it in in one sweep.”
ImageIn the dining room, a Florence Knoll table, Marcel Breuer chairs, Rams’s 606 shelves for Vitsoe and an artwork by Lewis Teague Wright.Credit...Ana TopoleanuWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.casino no deposit
