Casa Refugio closes itself off from an increasingly dense Querétaro street specifically so the family inside can stay open to each other across three floors. Designed by Querétaro-based studio Taller Segovia Molina, the house presents an almost hermetic volume to its suburb in Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico, while organizing its interior around sightlines, sound, and daily proximity between levels. The result is a home whose privacy points outward, not inward.
Built on a compact site, Casa Refugio occupies a 250-square-meter (2,691-square-foot) plot in the suburbs of Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico, yet holds 450 square meters (4,844 square feet) of built area across three levels — density absorbed by turning inward rather than up in scale. The tight footprint helps explain the hermetic street face: with neighbors close on every side, containment becomes a site constraint before it becomes an aesthetic choice.
A slow arrival delays the reveal. The entrance doesn’t disclose the house immediately; the path unfolds gradually until it reaches the social area — living room, dining room, kitchen — where a large rear garden appears as the space’s visual anchor. Vegetation grows to embrace the surrounding walls, and curtains blur the garden’s edges so it remains a constant, if never fully exposed, presence.
A barrel-vaulted staircase becomes the home’s main circulation axis, connecting levels, filtering daylight, and accompanying the family’s daily movement between floors. Rather than a simple connector, it works as the section’s organizing spine — the one element every level of the house has to pass through.
On the first floor, the family study sits beside a double-height interior garden, wrapped by a large window that keeps the site, its vegetation, and the day’s shifting light in constant view. At sunset, skylights cut into the roof throw colored reflections onto the patio walls, turning the passage into a brief, contemplative pause. Bedrooms on this level extend outward toward their own gardens, keeping even private rooms tied to green space.
A curved, board-formed concrete volume organizes the primary bedroom on the second floor, wrapping around and concealing the bathroom without resorting to a rigid orthogonal wall or a fully closed partition — a device not unlike the poured-concrete language Casa Tláloc explores elsewhere in Mexico. A circular skylight above the tub lights the space directly, and a small workspace nearby opens toward the double-height living area below, keeping a visual and acoustic link to it even as the house gains height.
Rather than isolating each floor as one climbs, the plan deliberately keeps its inhabitants close, letting daily life continue across levels without forcing anyone downstairs just to meet — a domestic priority that echoes the family-first complexity of houses like Casa Roja in Oaxaca. That decision runs against a common instinct in multi-story houses, where privacy usually means separation; here, the architecture keeps the family’s presence audible and visible from room to room.
The roof garden shifts function over the life of the house: elements that bring light into the interior below — domes, skylights, curved forms — resurface here as freestanding objects in their own right. Conceived initially as a space for quiet contemplation, the level now doubles as a play area, letting the architecture become a stage rather than only a container for one fixed use.
A house built to change, room by room, carries that logic through every level: the same skylight that colors a patio wall at sunset also tracks the seasons, and the same curved concrete that shapes a bathroom’s privacy reappears, months later, as a backdrop for a child’s rooftop game. Casa Refugio doesn’t ask its rooms to settle into one identity — over the course of a single day, several of them already haven’t.
Casa Refugio by Taller Segovia Molina | Location: Santiago de Querétaro, Querétaro, Mexico — Year: 2026 — Key materials: board-formed concrete, brick