Casa Bomboti

There is a way of walking San Miguel that only comes with time. You stop looking at the facades and start looking at the doors. Behind every doorway there is a courtyard. Behind every courtyard, a life you cannot see from the street.

Bomboti is one of those houses. It has stood since the eighteenth century, when the town was still called San Miguel el Grande. You arrive the way you arrive at most houses in the center: a wooden door, a wall that gives nothing away. Then the entryway opens, light drops into the courtyard and a different conversation begins.

Leaving its age in sight

Andrés Mier y Terán and Regina Galvanduque, of the studio MYT+GLVDK, did the hardest thing a designer can do here: they did not erase. They lifted the original cantera, cleaned it and set it back in place, dents and uneven color intact, leaving the cracks and the stains. No one tried to make the house look young.

A new language over an old memory

Over that stone they wrote with very few words. Unpainted steel that shifts with the light and the rain. Brown cantera from the region. Wood that lived another life. And matte black walls that, in a town of ochres and reds, feel almost like an act of courage.

Black changes the way you look. On a pale wall, the eye slides past. On a dark one, it stops: on the grain of a beam, the edge of a step, the shadow a window grille casts in the afternoon.

Steel walkways cross the courtyard like suspended bridges, and the house seems to breathe upward, stone by stone, to the mirador. Up there, all of San Miguel becomes landscape: domes, bell towers and the Bajío sky changing color at dusk.