Terrazza Alba in Mexico City is the heart of a Mexican home

In an enormous Mexico City, pulsating with life and growth, where a multiplicity of stories seeks space as domestic environments become increasingly compact, Terraza Alba by Omar Vergara Taller has taken shape. The story unfolds on the rooftop of a building in the Narvarte neighborhood, where a couple of mathematicians were looking for space for work, conviviality, and the cultivation of a very specific hobby: brewing craft beer. Around an idea of light, around the multiple identities a curtain can assume, and above all around a sculptural counter shaped by the gestures of sharing and by a deep cultural legacy, the terrace has come into being, together with the intuition to recognize a series of latent opportunities.

Omar Vergara

It is Omar Vergara, who founded Omar Vergara Taller in 2017, who recounts these turning points. First of all, a home that already held the potential for another within: “Today in Mexico City, when you buy a top-floor apartment, you’re also sold the possibility of extending upward”. Alongside the 95 square meters dedicated to conventional domestic functions, a hybrid space emerged, one the owners had not yet clearly envisioned. “They wanted something simple, a new cover for a barbecue, but after the first meetings we saw great potential here: to create a completely different space in the city, different even from the apartment below”.

The client comes from Oaxaca, a Mexican state rich in material and natural culture. “I always say Oaxaca is special,” Vergara adds, “because the indigenous spirit of our Mexican culture is especially strong there”. The green that punctuates the entire space translates into everyday domestic life the chromatic qualities of the region’s minerals, as explained by OVT’s Valeria Flores; the same origin informs the earthy tones found on the walls.

Then comes the kitchen.
The role of the counter – the green-tiled monolith orienting the entire space – mirrors that of the kitchen in Mexican tradition: “It's like a ritual, a very community- and family-oriented place. It is where life happens, like a cycle: you can communicate with your family in the morning, eat with them in the afternoon, dine with them at night, but also parties and gatherings happen here all the time. It’s the heart of the Mexican house”.

Around this core, the layout of a hybrid, convivial, and inhabitable terrace develops, a place to retreat for relaxation or work, or to host friends and visitors. Everything gravitates around it, and through its flows it simultaneously defines the terrace’s plastic, sinuous form, in a true choreography of living. A large curtain becomes the tool to define these flows, adapting to the different scenarios desired for the space. It can separate the counter in its beer-lab function from the TV area and studio, or isolate only the studio while keeping the social space continuous, accessible directly from the condominium stairwell without crossing the apartment’s inner rooms, and extending toward the open portion of the terrace, framed by a built-in masonry bench.

No need to evoke Renzo Piano’s 1970s project, still what unfolds atop this urban building can be described as an evolutionary home: an atmosphere shaped by the culture and materiality of different places, all tied to the lives of those who inhabit it.

Looking through the glazing with its slender green steel frames, one might glimpse traces of the Mexico City Luca Guadagnino sought to evoke in the model interiors of Queer – without reaching the chemically heightened excesses inspired by Burroughs. An urban sky penetrates light walls, while the rooftops of neighboring buildings form a living carpet just below.
It is the story of a city intertwining with that of a family, with its roots, translated through the ancestral presence of material and craftsmanship meeting the gestures of contemporary living.