THE MEXICAN ARCHITECT Fernando Romero always wanted to build airports. He designed one in La Unión, El Salvador, that’s currently being finished, seven years after another he co-designed with the British architect Norman Foster in his hometown, Mexico City, was canceled midconstruction following a public referendum over its budget (nearly $11 billion). He’s also conceived museums — like the capital’s imposing, anvil-shaped Museo Soumaya (2011), made to display the art collection of the billionaire Carlos Slim, Romero’s former father-in-law — and concert halls, notably the asymmetrical Casa da Música (2005) in Porto, Portugal, a collaboration with Rem Koolhaas. Romero, 54, worked under the Dutch architect for the first four years of his career, then returned to Mexico to establish his own firm.
What he hasn’t yet done is a great ground-up private residence. “The best architects manage to do masterpieces in houses,” he says one sunny October afternoon in Mexico City. “When you do an airport or another public commission, there are more people involved. But when you do a house, you have freedom.” For the last 15 years, Romero has lived in a Modernist, L-shaped villa finished in 1955 by the local architect Francisco Artigas. Hidden behind a wall in an elegant residential area next to Chapultepec Park, the home was formerly shared with his ex-wife, Soumaya Slim, and their five children. Earlier this decade, however, he found another midcentury dwelling down the street: Though this one was blockier and less distinctive, and by an unknown architect, he nonetheless believed it could be a perfect vessel in which to test his colorful, futuristic domestic theories. When the nearly 14,000-square-foot property’s price dropped during the pandemic, he made an offer, spent six years reimagining it, then moved in this past January. “It was a modern house that didn’t have any value because it was generic,” he says. “What I’ve done is simply organize the relationship between the indoors and the outdoors.”
To accomplish this, Romero replaced the straight glass wall that once formed the long back edge of the rectangular structure with an undulant stretch of museum-quality glass that’s very transparent, lacking the green cast inherent to so much residential glass. Its dramatic curves create different apertures as you move down the row of rooms, from the public-facing living area and library near the entry to the private spaces (a kitchen; three bedrooms) in the home’s farthest reaches. Romero says the house has a “liquid layout,” with arcing walls and long curtains that soften the effect of the glass and shiny new resin floors. You hear visitors in the entry vestibule before you see them and when friends come for dinner, they meet for cocktails in a lounge with low gray furniture — the ceilings are just under seven feet high — until they eventually wander past an enclosed, terrariumlike indoor garden to the magenta dining room beyond. Nearby, there’s a purple-carpeted, textured-concrete closet, intended only for playing chess, accessible via a secret door.
Although the house was previously spread over two stories, Romero pushed the entire living space to what was the top floor, now accessible by a gently sloped walkway. (Where once there were bedrooms and servants’ quarters downstairs, it’s now just storage.) By establishing a more compact layout, Romero hoped people would spend time outside, in the front and back gardens abundant with ferns, cactuses, succulents and old fruiting trees, from which he often takes a mandarin for good luck, carrying the orange in his pocket all day. “Mexico has the best climate in the world,” he says. “In one year, that garden will be eating the house.”
BOTH INSIDE AND out, he relied on bold hues that he believed might energize him and his practice. The exterior metal cladding is bright orange, he says, “because that’s the color you find in Japanese temples — and your own home is like your sacred space.” The dining room is painted and furnished in a shocking pink that recalls the work of Luis Barragán: Romero purchased the legendary midcentury Mexican architect’s 1960s-era flamingo-colored Cuadra San Cristóbal in 2017 and is now transforming it into a cultural center. The Kelly green library mimics the tropical plants beyond the glass, but the architect now worries the shade appears too garish against the books’ browns and beiges. He and his team of 60-plus are constantly changing and moving things around, treating the space more as a laboratory than a domicile; as he says, “This is not a masterpiece. It’s more like a pavilion — a temporary house.”
Although he often entertains here, he also enjoys being alone, dragging a 1930s Dutch antique dining chair onto the back patio, where he listens to the waterfall-like fountain he installed while dragonflies dart around. Romero might spend all of Sunday reading and drawing outside — what he calls his weekend’s “biggest luxury.” Next he wants to design a boat, a catamaran similar to the model he has framed on one wall of the chess room. But his mind always returns to the residence he hopes to soon build for himself — if only he could find good land in the city, or perhaps along the Mexican coastline. “If you have the freedom, a house should represent its time,” he says. “I modified what was here. But my next house, my dream house, will be built from zero.”
