When architect Aranza García purchased a house in her hometown of Mérida, Mexico, around the corner from Chuch Estudio, her vibrant design manufactory, she went in with a small budget and zero plans or renderings. The home was built sometime in the 19th century, so it took a lot of guesswork to even find the plumbing, and it took time to understand the space before she could begin filling it with the custom furniture and bold colors she’s known for. “It’s my first architectural project, and at first I thought it was going to be a lot easier,” says the 25-year-old Dwell 24 alum and September/October 2022 issue cover star. “I thought I’d just paint, change the sink, I don’t know.” A crew of contractors located the plumbing; Yucatán humidity required repairing and plastering a few walls. “I thought I was going to do it in, like, three months,” she says with a laugh.

One year later, García opened Casa Picapiedra, a gorgeous one-bedroom Airbnb that she hopes is just the first step in her goal of one day opening a boutique hotel. The restoration helped uncover the home’s original pasta-style floor tiles—a European-influenced pattern of salmon and muted teal starbursts —and she used these as a starting point for the vibe. Peeling off some white paint exposed the original muted yellow on the walls, giving the space a playful patina rooted in the history of the locale—near Paseo de Montejo, an avenue built in the late 19th century, and Centro de Mérida, a mix of colonial structures, Mayan art, and contemporary boutiques.

García also wanted to respect the integrity of the house, keeping the original glass front doors and installing ceiling-high curtains—both central features of many original homes in Mérida—and simply zhuzhing it up with a little pink paint to match the exterior. “I didn’t want to tear it down and make it feel like ‘gentrification.’ When you’re outside, you don’t even think about what’s inside the house,” she says. Mérida is a major tourism city—Chichén Itzá is an hour and a half away by bus—so García found it important to reflect the culture in which she grew up, rather than adopt the muted, sand-colored tones and modernized black hardware she says mar some of Mérida’s colonial-era structures. “It really feels like just some other old house,” she says.

“I wanted to do a rental that has a different essence from all of the others here in Mérida.”
—Aranza García, designer

García embraced the unconventional aspects of the renovation. “I wanted to try something new. I think there are other architects and designers who don’t want to take that risk,” she says. She crafted Casa Picapiedra almost on the fly, “mistake by mistake.” Because her business is on the block, García is already a fixture in the area, and the process piqued the neighborhood’s interest. “Everybody was like, What color is gonna be next? When are you gonna open?” she says. “This career is a perfectionist career, so until I got it right, I wasn’t gonna open it.”

Project Credits:

Interior Designer: Chuch Estudio

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For Her First Renovation, a Mérida Designer Went “Mistake By Mistake”