Historic Home in Roma Norte

Casa Margarita is a four bedroom home with a story.

In 1914, a poet from Zacatecas named Ramón López Velarde arrived in Mexico City and fell for a woman ten years older than him — Margarita Quijano, a professor of French and Spanish literature at the Escuela Normal, appointed to her chair by Justo Sierra himself. She was, by every account, one of the more formidable minds in the city's literary circles. López Velarde called her "la dama de la capital" and built poems around her, but what biographers keep circling back to isn't the romance, it's the reading list. She fed him books. The poet who wrote Zozobra was, in some real sense, her student first.

She lived out her life in this house in what's now Roma Norte, built in 1903 during the neighborhood's first wave of development, and in her later years she ran her family's tea salon, La Gacela, where the same literary crowd kept gathering. She never wrote a book herself. She just seems to have been the person everyone interesting orbited.

Casa Margarita is still standing, and Proyectos Públicos — a group that's made a habit of resurrecting Mexico City's architecturally protected old buildings — has spent the last couple of years turning it back into something people occupy rather than just admire. The bones are intact and INBAL-protected: dark wood wainscoting, stained glass, ceilings that make you look up. Downstairs, a café shifts into a wine and cocktail bar by evening; there's a fragrance boutique tucked in the basement and a small fashion label on the ground floor. Upstairs and around, they run reading clubs, live music, and an artist residency you can't apply to, you have to be asked.

Casa Margarita features four bedrooms: : two suites, a studio, and an apartment with its own kitchenette and a view over the jacarandas. It's styled like the inherited home of a woman who spent her whole life surrounded by people smarter for having known her.