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 it,’” 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.
The 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.”
THE HOUSE NOW fully exposed, Cerrillo began fine-tuning it, a two-year project that he considered part of his artistic practice. “All the custom-made elements may appear decorative,” he says, “but for me, they’re part of a larger body of research.” Everywhere you look, there are references to masters of 20th-century architecture: a rectangular glass kitchen hood that’s borrowed from the work of Lina Bo Bardi; small black cement floor tiles in the spirit of Le Corbusier; a beveled terrazzo staircase that nods to Gerrit Rietveld. Some of the home’s original doors and windows, in heavy wood that had deteriorated over time, were replaced with steel ones forged by the Oaxacan metal artisan Pablo Reyes, with whom Cerrillo has collaborated for more than two decades. “In Mexico’s climate, you can work with delicately detailed steel,” says von Werz, “the lightness of which is perfect to open up the building and give it a transparent, greenhouse-like sensation.” As he had done with his installations, Cerrillo painted the metal in dusty colors — blush rose, slate blue, army green — that recall the pastels preferred in the 1980s by the Italian architect Ettore Sottsass.
Elsewhere, von Werz left frames once claimed by antique windows and doors completely empty to allow for revealing glimpses between rooms. On the second floor, for instance, a coolly spare living area with a pair of moss green Ligne Roset sofas opens into an ample dining room with a Florence Knoll dining table that Cerrillo inherited from an uncle and, next to it, a cozy library with a fireplace, its 110-year-old mottled green ceramic mantelpiece intact. Near that, there’s a reading nook with a bench reupholstered in a joyful Josef Frank fabric that Cerrillo bought on a trip to Stockholm while a student in the 1990s, unsure until now how he’d ever use it.
In the back structure, past a bridgelike platform that runs along one side of the 33-foot-high atrium, an enlarged, 12-by-20-foot kitchen has a square patio designed around a wall fountain inspired by Luis Barragán’s early work in 1930s Guadalajara, Mexico — a small oasis, the first in a series of alfresco spaces climbing up the rear of the building. “Since José León’s main reason to buy the house was the atrium, we created a sequence of stitched-together terraces that spiral out from it,” von Werz says. Above the kitchen, another terrace allows access to Cerrillo’s bathroom, with its asunaro wood soaking tub and nearby porthole. “The idea was to be able to lie in the tub and have a view of the sky — a little indulgence,” the artist says. And yet the home’s true indulgence may be on the bathroom’s opposite end: a solid Brazilian granite door that leads to his bedroom, which closes a circuit — from bed to bath to patio to kitchen — informed by his morning routine. “In a way,” says von Werz, “the most radical intervention in the house, which is invisible, was to insert a thought-out pathway for daily use.”
The promenade continues to the lush rooftop garden. This is the artist’s favorite spot, where he spends his weekends reading and tending to four big planters made from tezontle, a porous stone the color of dried blood that’s characteristic of colonial facades in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico and filled with, among other plants, pomegranate, cazahuate and a stately blue agave. Perfectly framed between the pots, the crown of an old ficus tree rooted in the sidewalk below bends over the terrace, joining Cerrillo’s greenery while shielding him from the tourist-thronged street. Up here, he sometimes thinks about his last house. “Modernism claimed to dissolve the boundaries between interior and exterior but, in practice, it was like living in a cave,” he says. “Here the rooms actually feel like you’re outside — not something I expected from an early 20th-century house.” Even if, of course, it took some work to get there.
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