It meant someone would greet me and attempt to have a full-fledged conversation on the street having just experienced perhaps the best day of their life, even if on the inside I was arriving on that sidewalk from a completely different plane of existence. It’s a pleasant cloud to be in sometimes and should be just as accepted as happiness would be. Noticing how others had this grip on love admittedly made me sad but not in a sense that I was afraid of. The air felt romantic in a soft way: upfront but not obtuse. Pretty soon I associated San Miguel as a place for hedonists. Not many were eating or wandering solo like I was. Most afternoons I would sit near the basketball courts at Parque Benito Juárez and watch those competitively play ball while stray dogs would pass me by. Peppered throughout the town are fountains carved into the sides of homes displaying religious or aquatic figures above a spigot of running water. I would walk through the hills to peer down on Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel, watching couples get engaged and mariachi bands serenading tourists while they withdrew cash from the ATM. San Miguel de Allende is a stunning city on foot. When the louvered windows were open the ‘inside’ dissolved away. What I liked about the home was similar in vein to the modernist movement in California: the outside was just as important as the indoors. Up there you felt like your head was in the heavens, especially on days it would storm and the thunder cracked what sounded like inside of you. Above were two bedrooms split down the middle from a spiral staircase leading you upwards to the rooftop where you could see San Miguel in its entirety. The built-in sofa wrapped around a blackened fireplace inset to the wall was where I spent most of my time, especially every morning ritualistically sipping on my coffee until it ran cold while I stretched and meditated. Beyond was my favorite zone in the house: the sunken living room. To the left is the Landin dining table with textured carved legs, seated with the lean but solid Lupita aluminum chair. Symmetrically centered on the right half of the room is a stone island in the kitchen glowing from a hanging aluminum pendant much like an ancient scale set perfectly in balance. The facade is nondescript from the walking street with a seamless portal that opens up to an expansive ground level fortified with OHLA-designed furniture and a full wall of north-facing vertical louver windows. A concise color palette congruent to the choices in furniture and building materials. As a case study it had this aura of quietude. Can you imagine? Only the painted walls had their texture touched by the heat while I stood breathless in the streets.įor the next two weeks Sin Nombre was my home–A house designed by OHLA Studio, a practice based in San Miguel whose forte is art direction, interior and landscape design as well as furniture production with their core collection Alcocer. At this time of year the sun sat high in the sky to stand on top of buildings. Towering above you are the spires dedicated to Saints with totems of angels weathered by the elements. They present walled-in courtyard homes with epic portals standing shoulder-to-shoulder, block by block. The cobblestone streets are narrow and almost incandescent from the heat. I found myself in a fairy tale of a town painted with rich tones of rust, gold and rose. The streets vibrate like a Morse code written by the footsteps of thousands before you. You can feel your entrance to San Miguel. An hour of this and almost suddenly I was arriving at the town only before experienced as a pin on google maps. It felt funny as it felt serious, this soundtrack. Although my eyes never adjusted, I was mostly kept awake by the blaring Top 40 radio station. We drove through the dusted mountains in a day-to-night royal hue. Half awake from a night flight to León and in my taxi with a bluish-purple tint to the windows, the drive through the mountains precisely at sunrise was colored luridly.
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