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    Bunkhouse and Reurbano convert 1940s Mexico City apartments into boutique hotel

    American hotel brand Bunkhouse and interior design studio Reurbano have used motifs derived from the history of a Mexico City structure when converting it into a boutique hotel.

    Hotel San Fernando is located in the Condesa neighbourhood of Mexico City, a largely residential zone that in recent years has seen an influx of national and international travellers.
    Bunkhouse and Reurbano have converted a 1940s apartment building into a boutique hotel in Mexico CityBunkhouse worked with local interior design studio Reurbano to take a 1940s apartment building and convert it into a 19-room hotel, with finishes informed by the neighbourhood.
    The face of the structure was restored and painted a light green, with darker green used on the awnings that provide coverage for seating attached to the hotel’s lobby and restaurant, which open to the street through glass-paned French doors.
    It features renovated spaces that maintain details of the original structureAn art deco-style logo spells out the name of the hotel above the door. Saint Fernando is known as the patron saint of engineers, and the team wanted to highlight this by maintaining the name of the original building in the branding of the new structure.

    “We wanted to honour this building,” said Bunkhouse senior vice president of design Tenaya Hills.
    “We love the story and the history and like to imagine what it has been for people over the decades.”
    A spiral staircase leads from the lobby to the rooftopThis primary entrance features a metal door with glass panes informed by the original stained glass of the building.
    The entry corridor leads past a lobby lounge, with lighting by Oaxaca studio Oaxifornia and furnishings by local gallery Originario; and design studios Daniel Y Catalina, and La Metropolitana, which also created custom furniture for all of the guest suites.
    At the far end of the lobby lounge is the restaurant’s bar, which features a large semi-circular cabinet with mirrored back to hold the spirits. A chandelier by local sculptor Rebeca Cors hangs above the clay-clad bar.
    French doors feature at the entrance and on some of the roomsThe entrance corridor has green encaustic concrete tiles from the original building. Other original details include the wainscotting and casement windows.
    A reception area is located at the end of the corridor and behind it is a circular staircase with metal-and-wood railing that leads all the way up through the building, with landings on each of its five floors, terminating at a terrace on top of the building.

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    The guest rooms range from single-room setups to multi-room suites, the largest of which are accessed through French doors with opaque windows.
    Here the studio departed from the greens used on the exterior and the lobby and utilised soft orange, pink and white paints.
    Light colours and hand-crafted goods fill the roomsFloors in the rooms are either tile or wood and furniture made from light-coloured wood is covered by locally derived textiles. Three rooms on the rooftop level feature furniture designed by Bunkhouse and fabricated by local design outfit B Collective Studio.
    Pendant lamps and sconces by local ceramicist Anfora are found in the kitchens and bathrooms.
    The rooftop features sculptural breeze blocksThe rooftop features a tiled dining and lounge area surrounded by sculptural breeze blocks, designed to mimic the original building’s patterned stained glass.
    Mexican design studios Mexa and Comité de Proyectos contributed furniture pieces for the rooftop.
    Other hotels in Mexico include a tile-clad structure in San Miguel de Allende by Productora and Esrawe Studio and a hotel in Mexico City with wooden lattices by PPAA.
    The photography is by Chad Wadsworth. 

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    RA! clads Mexico City taco restaurant with broken tiles

    Local architecture studio RA! took cues from Latin American art deco design when creating the tiny interior of Los Alexis, a small taqueria in Mexico City’s Roma Norte neighbourhood.

    Los Alexis is a taco eatery – or taqueria – in Roma, a famed district in Mexico City, which features examples of art deco architecture.
    Los Alexis is a small taqueriaRA! drew on the “vibrant personality” of the area when designing the single 15-square-metre room restaurant, housed within a former beer depository.
    “One of the most important requests of our client was for this tiny space to shine among the rest of the retail premises on the street,” said studio co-founder and designer Pedro Ramírez de Aguilar.
    RA! clad the floors and walls in a mosaic of broken tilesRA! clad the walls and floors in a distinctive mosaic of broken ceramic tiles with green joints as an ode to Barcelona, where chef Alexis Ayala spent time training, the designer told Dezeen.

    A curved bar finished in slabs of ribbed green material fronts the open kitchen, which is positioned on the right of the small open space.
    Utilitarian materials were selected for their resilienceUtilitarian materials, including the tiles, were chosen throughout the restaurant for their “endurance and fast cleaning processes”.
    White-painted steel breakfast-style stools line the bar, which has a bartop made of steel – selected for its resistance to grease, according to Ramírez de Aguilar.

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    The studio decided to preserve the space’s original, peeling ceiling “to create a wider contrast [within the eatery] and to remember the old premises”.
    Informal seating lines the pavement just outside of the taqueria where customers can eat and socialise.
    The one-room eatery is defined by its bar and open kitchenOther than a small bathroom at the back of Los Alexis, the one-room restaurant is purposefully defined by its bar and open kitchen.
    “Typical ‘changarros’ [small shops] in Mexico City are all about the conversation with the cookers, so we tried to have this interaction between people as a main objective,” explained Ramírez de Aguilar.
    Founded in 2017, RA! previously created the interiors for a restaurant in the city’s Polanco neighbourhood with a bar counter shaped like an inverted ziggurat.
    DOT Coffee Station is another hole-in-the-wall cafe in Kyiv, Ukraine, which YOD Group designed with a similar floor-to-ceiling mosaic of tiles.
    The photography is courtesy of RA!

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