Casa Cardona

Casa Cardona gives a small urban house a surprisingly inward-looking character. From the street, a deep pink upper volume stands above a shaded entrance. A narrow panel of perforated masonry interrupts the solid wall, while planting softens the route to the front door. The first impression is one of enclosure; the rooms behind it reveal a more open sequence.

Designed by Sensacional Dinámica Mexicana in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, the 165 m² residence brings together three generations of one family. The studio describes the facade’s pink, wine and violet tones as a response to the brief flowering of desert plants. Its mass and latticework address the intense sunlight of the Potosí Highlands. These are the architects’ stated intentions; the photographs offer a closer look at how colour, openings and depth give the house its domestic character.

The entrance is set back beneath the upper floor. A pink column and an overhead slab turn arrival into a short passage rather than an exposed doorway. Beside it, a few broad steps pass through a planted strip. Yellow-toned joinery gives the door a distinct place within the pink walls. This small change in depth matters as much as the building’s strong colour: it creates a transition between the pavement and the interior.

Inside, the dining area faces a courtyard through tall glazed folding doors. In the open-door photographs, the leaves gather at the sides and the table reads as part of a larger indoor-outdoor room. Perforated brickwork continues along the edge, admitting fragments of light and views while retaining a boundary. Plants sit within this enclosure rather than forming a distant backdrop beyond a large garden.

A mezzanine introduces another scale above the kitchen and sitting area. Its warm yellow underside makes a clear horizontal line within the taller pink room, and a fine balustrade preserves views between the levels. Below, the kitchen, table and sofa occupy recognisable places without being sealed into separate rooms. The images suggest a house organised through changes of height and orientation as well as through walls.

Light also enters from above. Circular roof openings appear over the planted void and beside the staircase, while a long opening draws daylight into an upper passage. In these photographs, the pink surfaces vary from pale rose beside the sky to a deeper burgundy in shadow. Colour is therefore experienced across several depths, rather than as a single flat facade treatment.

The project’s most useful lesson is its handling of thresholds. A sheltered entrance, a screen, folding doors and openings in the roof offer different degrees of contact with the outside. They make a compact home feel spatially varied while supporting the architects’ brief for shared family life and privacy. No room-by-room allocation, measured thermal performance or completion year is documented in the supplied press kit.