Casa Cardona Is Named After a Fruit That Lasts Two Months

Residential Architecture · Mexico

Reading time: 12 min

Casa Cardona occupies the same 165 square metre plot as the houses on either side of it, in a new residential street on the edge of San Luis Potosí. What changed was not the envelope but everything inside it, and the name of the house turns out to be the name of a cactus fruit that is only itself for about two months of the year.

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Casa Cardona was designed by Sensacional Dinámica Mexicana for a plot in a new residential development in San Luis Potosí, in the high Mexican Altiplano. It runs to 165 square metres across two storeys, it was built for three generations of one family, and it began life as a standard unit in a speculative scheme with a budget set by what the finished house could be sold for.

There is one photograph in the set that explains the project faster than any plan could. Taken from a roof across the street, it shows a row of two-storey houses on a wide concrete road, the dry hills of the Altiplano behind them and the city spreading out to the right. Second from the left, exactly the same height and footprint as its neighbours, is a deep pink block with a panel of perforated brick set into its upper wall. Nothing about the plot changed. Everything about what sits on it did.

The same box, carved differently

Most new housing in Mexico arrives this way: a developer sets the plot, the footprint, the storey height and the cost, and the house is drawn to fit. Sergio Padilla, who founded the studio, has described the real difficulty of Casa Cardona as turning an economic and market-driven condition into a project with emotional depth. That is a design problem rather than a budget one, and the moves it produced are all subtractions.

From the air you can see three of them. The roof has become a terrace enclosed by high parapet walls, so the top of the house reads as an open room rather than a lid. A bite has been taken out of the ground floor to make a deep recessed porch under the mass above, which shades the entrance and parks a car without a separate structure. And the side of the plot that would normally be a dead margin has been opened as a narrow planted slot, entered up three cast concrete steps between two tall pink walls, with climbers running up one side of it.

The street elevation and the brick panel on the corner. Photography: LGM Studio, courtesy of Sensacional Dinámica Mexicana via v2com.

The side margin opened as a planted approach. Photography: LGM Studio, courtesy of Sensacional Dinámica Mexicana via v2com.

Inside, the same logic removes a floor. A section of the first floor has been taken out so the kitchen, dining and living spaces share one double-height volume, with a mezzanine looking down into it behind a slim pink-painted steel balustrade. In a house of this size that is an expensive thing to give away in square metres and a cheap thing to buy in feeling, which is the trade the whole project is built on.

What a cardona actually is

The name is the most interesting thing nobody has explained, so it is worth doing properly.

A tuna cardona is a fruit. It grows on the nopal cardón, Opuntia streptacantha, a cactus endemic to Mexico that the botanic garden at UNAM records across the Altiplano and the sierras between 1,600 and 2,400 metres, in San Luis Potosí among a dozen other states. The species has carried the word in its own botanical name: Opuntia cardona is listed among its synonyms. The fruit is round, up to about five centimetres across, dark red to yellowish on the outside, with flesh that runs from red to orange.

In San Luis Potosí that fruit is not a botanical curiosity, it is a regional industry and a sweet. UNAM notes that the state uses it to make queso de tuna and melcocha, both of which are the fruit boiled down until it sets. It is also the base of colonche, the fermented drink made from Opuntia streptacantha in San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas and Aguascalientes. If you grew up in the Altiplano, the cardona is a flavour before it is a plant.

And it is brief. UNAM puts flowering in April and May and fruiting in August and September, which gives the cardona a window of roughly two months in the year when it is actually a fruit. Padilla has said he wanted to freeze a temporal gesture rooted in the Mexican desert, the ephemeral colour of an arid landscape. Put those two facts side by side and the house stops being a pink house with a nice story attached to it. It is a two-month fruit, built in render and brick, and left standing all year.

The pink does not stop at the walls

The exterior finish is a textured pink render, and in strong raking light it shifts across the day from pink towards wine and violet. That much has been written about. What has not is what happens when you go inside, and it is the best decision in the building.

The pink does not stop. It runs up the walls, across the ceilings, around the reveals and over the soffits, in the same coarse, hand-floated render, so that there is no line anywhere for the eye to catch on. A room at Casa Cardona is not a white box with a coloured wall in it. It is a single continuous pigment with the furniture set down inside.

Two consequences follow, and both are visible in the photographs. The first is that every bounce of light in the house is tinted, so the colour of a room changes with the hour rather than one surface changing against a neutral ground. The second is that white becomes the rare material. In the upper room, a circular opening is cut through the soffit and reads as a long ellipse, half of it blazing, and a wash of daylight falls down the wall to a slender tree growing up from the floor below. The only white in the frame is the sky through the hole. A conventional palette could not have bought that.

The tree from the upper level, and the stair under its round skylight. Photography: LGM Studio, courtesy of Sensacional Dinámica Mexicana via v2com.

The same move is made flat along a corridor downstairs, where a slot of rooflight runs the length of the junction between wall and ceiling, so the light arrives as a band rather than a pool and grazes the render hard enough to show every mark of the float.

A brick screen that works from both sides

The perforated panel in the upper facade is a celosía in ceramic brick, bricks laid on edge with gaps between them so the wall becomes a grid of small openings. It is a standard piece of Mexican building, and the interest here is in where it has been put.

It is not only on the outside. The same screen forms a full-height internal wall beside the kitchen and dining area, so you meet it twice: as a pattern of shadow on the street elevation, and as a grid of daylight thrown across a clay tile floor indoors. One element is doing the work of a facade, a sunshade, a privacy device and a room divider, which in a house with 165 square metres to spend is the sort of economy that earns its place.

The celosía seen from the courtyard, and from inside with the doors folded back. Photography: LGM Studio, courtesy of Sensacional Dinámica Mexicana via v2com.

This site has looked at a lattice in a Mexican house before, at Casa Akina in Colima, where the screen is concrete and the climate is humid and coastal. The comparison is useful because it shows how far the same device travels. In Colima a lattice is mostly about moving air. Up here on the Altiplano, where the sun is the problem and the nights are cold, it is mostly about cutting light while keeping the wall solid.

Three generations in 165 square metres

The house was designed for a mother, her young son and the grandmother, three generations whose needs for company and for privacy do not line up. The plan answers that by varying the kind of space rather than the amount of it.

The shared level is open and tall, with the kitchen in exposed concrete running into a dining table and a sitting area, a timber ceiling of exposed joists washed with concealed light, woven pendant shades and pale clay tiles underfoot. Pink-painted steel doors fold back along one side so the room opens onto a gravel courtyard with a tree in it, and the distinction between the dining room and the yard effectively disappears for most of the year.

The timber ceiling and the mezzanine over the shared level. Photography: LGM Studio, courtesy of Sensacional Dinámica Mexicana via v2com.

Away from that, the house gets narrow and quiet. A stair climbs between two close pink walls under a round skylight. A corridor is lined with a long timber desk and a run of shelving, lit by that band of rooflight. A small planted light well, cut into the plan and uplit at night, puts cacti and ferns on the other side of a window where a neighbouring wall would otherwise be. None of these is a room in the estate agent’s sense, and all of them are places to be alone in a house with three adults’ worth of life in it.

The corridor desk, and low joinery under the mezzanine. Photography: LGM Studio, courtesy of Sensacional Dinámica Mexicana via v2com.

The material list is short and almost entirely matt: textured render, exposed concrete, clay floor tiles, timber, painted steel and glass. Padilla calls this austere luxury, a luxury of light, wind, stone, earth and shade rather than of finish. It is a defensible claim here because the palette is also the structure, and there is very little in the building that exists only to be looked at.

Sensacional Dinámica Mexicana

The studio works from San Luis Potosí across architecture, furniture, landscape and contemporary art, the last through its own Aether, a gallery space it built in 2017. Its stated method is to read the territory first: a practice shaped by the Altiplano, where scarcity sharpens invention and local materials and craftspeople carry real weight.

On the evidence of Casa Cardona that is not a brochure line. The colour is a regional fruit, the screen is a regional building technique, the plants are desert plants and the house is sited for a desert sun. What makes the project worth attention beyond its own street is that all of this was delivered inside a developer’s envelope, on a developer’s budget, on a plot that was never meant to produce architecture at all.

The photographs are by LGM Studio, who have given the house exactly the right treatment: the interiors shot late, when the render is at its deepest, and one clear-eyed daylight frame from across the road that sets the whole thing in context.

Where it sits

Casa Cardona is in San Luis Potosí, in central Mexico, on the Altiplano. It is a private house and not open to visitors, which makes the photographs the whole of the public record.

It is worth saying what the project is not. It is not a one-off on a spectacular site with an open budget, which is what most published Mexican houses are. It is a unit in a scheme, built to a sale price, in a street of other units built to the same one. The reason to look at it closely is that the constraints are the ones most houses are actually built under.

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Final thoughts

The easy version of this house is the colour, and the colour is doing a lot. But the decision that holds the whole thing together is quieter: the pigment was carried over the ceilings as well as the walls, so there is no neutral ground anywhere in the building and light has nothing to be read against except itself.

Everything else follows from the same instinct to commit. The roof became a room. The margin became a garden. A floor was removed to buy height. A brick screen was asked to do four jobs at once. And a house was named after a fruit that is only a fruit for two months of the year, then built to hold that colour for the other ten.