Casa Dos Gatos

The house sits on a narrow lot and grows upward, three levels and a roof. Inside, you feel held. The house leads you forward, then up. Nothing prepares you for what lies behind it.

The land at the back was once hidden behind a tall wall with small windows, set higher than the house and impossible to imagine as part of it. Deborah worked with Floresta, for eight months to bring the two together. Today it's a 500-square-meter walled garden, bigger than the house itself.

The reference was El Charco del Ingenio, the botanical garden a short walk away. She sent thousands of pictures: the paths, the benches made from fallen trees. No furniture, no buildings, no pool. Native plants, left to grow wild.

There were a few rules, all of them for the cats. No trees against the walls, so no one could climb out. A small patch of grass to play on and, beside it, a vegetable garden. The day the doors finally opened, one cat ran straight to the only rock in the garden, jumped onto the wall and was gone. After eight months of work, Deborah could only laugh. He's a wild animal, she decided. It's fine. The house is named after them.

That patch of grass became her place too. At golden hour, she takes off her shoes and lies down on it. Some evenings, friends come over, someone lights a wood fire, and nobody goes anywhere else.

Around four o'clock, the sun comes in through the front of the house and everything turns gold. The light runs across the walls and the wood, and later breaks into squares of shadow that move slowly through the rooms. The house is never the same twice in one day.

Upstairs, the bedroom looks out over the open land next door, where a small flock of sheep and a few horses come down to graze. There's a window seat for watching them. Nearby, a TV room can become a second bedroom behind sliding doors. Beside it, a built-in bookcase Felipe left empty.

Deborah is a writer, and her life is books. Over three years, she filled that bookcase one book at a time, many of them from the Biblioteca, where secondhand books sell for forty pesos. San Miguel, she noticed, reads very well. Late in the day, light from the bedroom reaches the shelves and the whole wall glows.

"I looked at that empty bookcase and thought, okay, game on."

On one wall hangs a piece by a San Miguel weaver, made from the straw once used to make brooms. Deborah commissioned it for the house. They talked about sacred geometry and the feminine, and the artist herself chose where it would hang. Inside, a few pieces from Namuh bring their own texture to the spaces.

At the top, the rooftop terrace opens out toward the city. There's a fire pit and a place to sit and eat. Solar panels are part of a house designed to make the most of natural light and air flowing through its different levels. Down at street level, the 83 m² garage once held Felipe's race cars. With plumbing already in place, it could become a guest casita, a studio, or a gym.