Artist Patricia Larsen picks up and moves just about every six years. The two are also artists and, like their mother, among the most inventive interior stylists we know (scroll to the end for Larsen family inspiration).
Photography by Patricia Larsen and Janaki Larsen.
That left her with a roofless skeleton that she happily spent the last two years making her own.
A street dog Patricia calls Gramps often sleeps by the front door (note the previous owner’s name etched in the brick).
In her home studio (formerly a literal pig sty), Patricia wears one of her limited-edition tunics—”I find the fabric first and that informs what I want to make.” Women in her neighborhood sew Patricia’s designs and she does the final detailing.
The central courtyard is where Patricia eats most of her meals. Scroll to the end for a look at the courtyard as it was.
When the remodel began, the fact that the house’s corrugated metal roof had been removed was a challenge during rainy season. During the 13 months of construction, Patricia lived a few blocks up the hill in a tiny rented house that she now uses as her main art studio.
The walls of the living room are finished with pulido, which Patricia describes as “a sort of Mexican version of Venetian plaster.” A niche serves as “a little altar” filled with coral, horns, rocks, porpoise spine found on a beach in Baja.
The dining room’s hanging copper light, made by craftsmen in San Miguel, is just about the only bright accent in the house: “I love color, but because I work with it so much, I like to be surrounded by pale whites, sand colors, and grays when I’m home. I find them restful.”
The dining room steps down into the kitchen, where Patricia balanced a metal cooking tray on a big white pot to make a breakfast table.
Patricia initially inserted the stainless-steel restaurant sink shown here.
Wanting “a contrast between finished walls and textured walls,” she peeled off the room’s colored plaster herself and left the original stone and stucco partially exposed.
The restaurant sink got replaced by a large copper pot purchased by the side of the road; Patricia’s plumber drilled a hole in it and added the brass taps.
A Tizio lamp sits atop an old screened cupboard used to store a collection of dishes, most of which Patricia—who works with clay and other ceramics herself—gathered on trips to Italy.
Patricia’s painting After Glow sits on a table in her bedroom where some of the walls are finished and others, such as this one, were left raw: “they’re like a map of the house over the years.”
“Simple, simple, simple: a long table, a chair, and a bed. I keep the bedroom really minimal deliberately,” says Patricia.
She removed the doors on the adjacent antique wardrobe and added a curtain “because I love draped fabric. It holds my collection of linen and jute from Mexico and Italy—I’m a fiend for old textiles.” Patricia has a walk-in closet for her clothes.
The bathroom, with a recycled tub and copper piping faucets, was formerly used as a chicken coop.
Before
A view of the construction in progress.
Located 185 miles northwest of Mexico City and 40 miles northeast of San Miguel de Allende, Mineral de Pozos is filled with ruins from the Mexican mining boom of the late 19th century. Here are some of our Larsen family posts from over the years.
Mineral de Pozos