Laura Aviva’s Design Sanctuary in Mexico City
The L’Aviva Home founder’s studio and home honours Mexican design excellence.
Photo by Fabian Martinez
Laura Aviva has been building her studio/home gallery in Mexico City for 20 years—she just didn’t know it. The designer, who founded L’Aviva Home in 2008, would often visit her close friend in the city, staying in their pied-à-terre, exploring the city, and dreaming about all the treasures she would buy at La Lagunilla, the Sunday flea market, for her fantasy Mexico City home.
Mexico’s capital was her first destination after the pandemic, and being back made her realize how much she missed it. “It was on that first trip back that I was hugely struck by how much I crave being here in this city, by how much it feeds me on so many levels,” she says.
Photo by Maureen M. Evans. Styling by Tessa Watson
Photo by Fabian Martinez
Photo by Fabian Martinez
Photo by Maureen M. Evans. Styling by Tessa Watson
Back home in New York, Aviva serves as the creative director of L’Aviva Home, a boutique design studio that specializes in textiles and lighting fixtures that emphasize craftsmanship and material. She and her team work with artisans and creatives across the world, including many in Mexico, from her homey Soho studio. So an expansion to Mexico City that would feed Aviva’s creative spirit and, by extension, L’Aviva Home, was natural.
In the La Condesa neighbourhood in a 1950s modernist building, the apartment was love at first sight for Aviva. “Seeing it for the first time, I knew instantly and viscerally that this was where I wanted to carve out a space of our own, to lay down stronger roots and cultivate a deeper community, and as a new creative outlet,” she recalls.
One year after first finding the space (and a gut renovation that left only the structural walls and original flooring), the completed home has been dubbed Piedra Terra after L’Aviva’s Piedra Collection of lighting.
Photo by Fabian Martinez
Photo by Maureen M. Evans. Styling by Tessa Watson
Visitors enter in the middle of the apartment’s long floor plan, which Aviva left unchanged, with a hallway to the common areas to the right and three bedrooms down a corridor to the left. Rather than the studio’s usual palette of black and neutrals, Aviva used colours that felt reflective of the place, incorporating vibrant pinks and greens in a light-filled space that blends contemporary shapes with traditional techniques. Using natural materials was important to her, especially emphasizing those that are indigenous to Mexico and have a historical connection—like the bathroom’s Verdi alpi marble inlay in the terrazzo floor, a material that appeared in many downtown buildings in the early 1900s.
Photo by Fabian Martinez
Photo by Fabian Martinez
Aviva’s concept for the space is multifaceted—Piedra Terra offers a place of respite for her and her team and honours the incredible Mexican design tradition. But it also creates an idyllic sanctuary for L’Aviva’s designs to live in, a product-design Eden that is the wind in the sails of each piece. “The idea here was to flip our creative process, to take a step back and to play with the idea of our answer to: ‘What would be, in our vision, the context and the surroundings and the complementary materials and textures that make these pieces shine brightest?’” she says.
Photo by Maureen M. Evans. Styling by Tessa Watson
Photo by Maureen M. Evans. Styling by Tessa Watson
L’Aviva’s lighting takes centre stage. Red-clay Oaxacan pottery pendants from the Atzompa Collection hang in a bedroom, a voluptuous Árbol lamp made from morado wood sits atop a slender table, and round Tecali stone sconces from the Piedra Collection illuminate the kitchen. Textiles and bed coverings from the brand’s Michoacán Collection, woven on treadle looms in Uruapan, add coziness.
In addition to L’Aviva’s pieces, Piedra Terra pays its respects to exemplary Mexican craftsmanship elsewhere. Among them are Isaac Castañeda’s midcentury-style wooden kitchen screens and bedroom window shades with a circular motif, a luxuriously deep, hammered bathtub designed with Sergio Velasquez, and local carpenter Anastacio Ramírez’s custom built-ins. A travertine plinth, created by a local stone worker, sprawls beneath modular green couch cushions, and stone columns support the large oval dining tabletop.
Photo by Maureen M. Evans. Styling by Tessa Watson
Photo by Maureen M. Evans. Styling by Tessa Watson
Now, in its finished state, Aviva describes the apartment as “part sanctuary, part playground, part gallery and showroom, part studio for both our NYC team and our growing Mexico City team to work, part space to host friends and clients.”
But, much like the studio’s ever-growing offerings, Piedra Terra will continue to evolve and refine. The latest addition is adding custom tiles by a Guadalajara ceramic artist that will run the full length of one of the bedrooms. “This project is by far the most personal thing I have ever done,” Aviva says. “It’s me.”
