Studio Font Rebuilds the Lost Arches of an Art Deco Apartment in Mexico City's Hipódromo Condesa

Hipódromo Condesa may be the most legible piece of planned modernity in Mexico City. It was laid out in the 1920s on the oval of a former horse-racing track and filled in through the 1930s and 1940s with Art Deco apartment blocks, so the neighbourhood carries its history in its street geometry and in its building stock. Popocatépetl 35 belongs to that fabric. By the time Studio Font, led by Raquel Font, took on this 150 m² apartment, decades of piecemeal updates had erased most of what made it belong to its block. Carpet covered the floors, drywall partitions had subdivided the plan, and the original finishes and arches were gone.

What interests us is the stance the studio took toward that loss. This is not a restoration. Font does not try to reconstruct a 1930s interior from evidence, and the apartment does not pretend to be one. The design brings back the arch, the curve and the hard mineral floor as a vocabulary, then lets oak joinery, sliding panels and an open kitchen speak in the present tense. The result shows how heritage can work inside a private interior: as a set of spatial rules the neighbourhood already understands, not as a museum period room.

Bringing Back the Arch

The arches carry the most weight in this project, and Font deploys them as a sequence, not as isolated ornaments. Seen in enfilade, the white plaster openings stack one behind another, compressing and releasing the view toward the kitchen. They work the way Art Deco interiors often did, choreographing movement through framed thresholds and leaving the decoration at the edges.

Look at where the arches stop. They meet a flat timber-and-glass door and a plain wall plane without any moulding or capital to soften the junction. That restraint keeps the reference honest. You read these as new arches drawing on an old language, and that is exactly the distinction the studio set out to make.

A Curving Terrazzo Spine

The drywall-era plan almost certainly relied on corridors and corners. Font replaces it with a curved passage floored in speckled terrazzo that links the social rooms. The curve matters: it slows the eye, softens transitions between rooms, and echoes the streamlined geometry that runs through the district, all the way down to the oval street plan the racetrack left behind.

At one pivot point, a white column picks up a wrap of curved timber shelving. It is a small move with a lot of leverage. A structural element that the old renovation would have tried to hide becomes the hinge of the living space, part furniture and part landmark, catching daylight as it passes from room to room.

Oak Portals into the Living Room

Where the arches are white and soft, the oak thresholds are dark, thick and rectilinear. This contrast stops the apartment from tipping into pastiche. The heavy timber frame around the living room opening works like a proscenium, so the green curved sofa, the woven rug and the tall gridded window read as a composed scene.

The tall window, with the street trees behind it, is the building's original gift, and the design is wise enough to centre the room on it. Two hanging ink scrolls flanking the opening show that the clients' own collection is expected to share the space with the architecture, not compete with it.

A Kitchen Built Like Furniture

The kitchen is the most openly contemporary room, and it is also where the project's material logic is clearest. An oak island sits on terrazzo, open timber shelves carry a collection of ceramics, and the walls are clad in white grid tile. Nothing is concealed behind full-height cabinetry. The ceramics become the decoration.

A timber ceiling canopy lowers the space over the work zone and gives the island a roof of its own. In an apartment where the arch defines most thresholds, this flat, framed soffit is a deliberate counterpoint. It tells you this room is about use, not procession.

Dining at the End of the Enfilade

The round dining table, its green chairs and a paper pendant lamp sit at the point where the arched sequence arrives. Framed by the last opening, the table becomes the destination of the plan, with the kitchen island visible just beyond. Cooking and eating share one continuous room without collapsing into a single undifferentiated open plan.

The kitchen corner shows the same discipline at a smaller scale. Oak cabinets, the timber ceiling frame and steel-framed windows meet cleanly, and the only flourish is a vase of lilies on the sill.

Sliding Oak Walls

In the private wing, Font swaps arches for timber portals and sliding oak panels. Here we see the brief's call for "new ways of inhabiting" in built form. The bedroom can open to the circulation or close off completely, and the panels sit alongside a built-in bookshelf so that one wall does the work of door, storage and room divider.

Low sun across the wood floor and ferns trailing from the top of the shelving give the room a slower, domestic register than the terrazzo spaces. The change of floor material from mineral to timber marks the shift from public to private as clearly as any wall.

The Bedroom Alcove

The bedroom pulls the arch back in, this time framing a fluted glass door, while a built-in timber shelf behind the bed creates a shallow alcove. It is a compact piece of joinery that turns a bed against a wall into a defined niche, and it shows how the studio uses carpentry to reshape rooms without moving structure.

In evening light, window shadows run across the plaster, a reminder that the project's most effective material is often the daylight the original Art Deco openings were designed to admit.

Bathrooms in Oak and Grid Tile

The bathrooms carry the kitchen's palette into wet spaces. Oak plank walls sit against white square tiles with dark grout, which gives the surfaces a measured graphic quality. A wall-hung toilet and a timber vanity keep the floor clear and the rooms visually light.

The steel-framed window above the vanity is worth noticing. Daylight falling across the tile grid gives a small, utilitarian room the same care the living spaces receive, and that consistency of attention is what holds the apartment together.

Plans and Drawings

The plan and axonometrics confirm what the photographs suggest. The curved terrazzo passage is the organising device, linking the living area, two bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchen, with a round seating area anchoring one end. The exploded axonometric pulls a vaulted volume out of the rooms, which makes clear that the arches belong to a deliberate three-dimensional system and are not applied surface.

The street section places the apartment within its multistorey block, facing an arched pavilion among the trees across the road. It is a pointed reminder of where the interior's language comes from. The kitchen axonometric details the island, round table, open shelving and laundry, and the cross section and ceiling plan of the vaulted niche show the arch worked out at the scale of the human body.

Why This Project Matters

Most apartment renovations in historic neighbourhoods fall into one of two traps: they erase the building's character for a generic interior, or they freeze it into nostalgia. Popocatépetl 35 avoids both. Studio Font treats the Art Deco legacy of Hipódromo Condesa as a grammar of arches, curves, mineral floors and framed light, and then writes new sentences with it in oak and grid tile.

There is a wider lesson for cities with large stocks of interwar housing. Much of that heritage survives only as fragments behind decades of drywall and carpet. This project shows that recovering a neighbourhood's memory does not require archival accuracy, only a clear reading of what made those spaces work and the discipline to bring it back without imitation.

Refurbishment Popocatépetl 35 by Studio Font (lead architect Raquel Font), Hipódromo Condesa, Ciudad de México, Mexico. Area: 150 m². Completed: 2025. Contractor: C2D. Photography: Fabian Martinez.

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