FIRST FLOOR / Afternoon room and master bedroom

The view to the garden on the second floor is reserved for the architect’s bedroom and the afternoon room — “the white room”, as it was colloquially known to its resident. The entrance to these rooms is made through a new spatial valve, a yellow one, which concentrates the morning light that comes from the hall and takes it inside both rooms. Sacred art and equestrian motifs are not missing in any of these two spaces.

In the master bedroom, next to a painting of the Annunciation, there is a small object, which often disturbs the visitors: a cardboard screen, no more than 30 centimeters high, covered with pictures of a Black female model, cut out of a fashion magazine. This minute detail is an anecdotal expression of the fundamental dialectics between ascetics and sensuality used in building the house. It is the same tension between apparent opposites consubstantial to the life of the man who imagined and inhabited this house. Alfonso Alfaro has written: “Luis Barragán is the creator of serene spaces. However, disturbing ghosts ambulate through his library. He is at the same time an ascetic and a dandy, a businessman and an artist, friend of the reverend Capuchin nuns and a Baudelaire reader, devotee of St. Francis and close to the muralists, exquisite and rural; a man whose Baroque heritage is expressed almost as a Zen masterpiece.”