trolling through the streets of the Mexican city of Merida, we discovered several very narrow houses. Although the walls of their facades have been there for more than a century, these houses were not always like this: in the early twentieth century, together they formed a house, which was divided into smaller ones until the current result. Today we enter one of them, Casa Lorena, a small house with a pink façade 4.5 meters wide and an interior of 125 square meters that the architecture studio Workshop has just renovated.
Upon entering, the first thing we find is a living room, with pink walls and a ceiling 5 meters high “that still retains its Decauville beams brought from France in the henequen era (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) and that were part of the construction system of that period, along with the wooden joists
A central courtyard separates the most public area, with living room, kitchen and dining room, from the more private, where the bedrooms and bathroom are located. In this outdoor space, the architects have left the walls bare to see its history and have created an oasis with tropical vegetation . The house has two bedrooms: one of them is accessed via a staircase, and the other is on the ground floor. The entrance of this second bedroom is marked by a wooden platform in which a small living area has been installed under a palm tree. The room is decorated in a very relaxed way, with very soft blues, yellows and greens and touches of wood. It has its own bathroom in which the architects have devised an interior patio to have ventilation and natural light. For the studio, “Casa Lorena is a small oasis within the city, it captivates us with its history and textures, and makes us fall in love with its pastel colors, transporting us to the past and a simpler time.”
