Mexico City has more museums than almost any city on earth, and most visitors see the same six. Over the past decade, though, a quieter scene has emerged: private collections, often housed in the family homes of the collectors themselves, open by appointment or on a single afternoon a week. They are small, eccentric and frequently extraordinary. Many have no website. Some have no sign. What follows is a short guide to five of the best, with a warning that opening hours are more of a mood than a promise.
Start in Coyoacán at Casa Villaseñor, a colonial house built around a courtyard of orange trees and a stone fountain. The collection, assembled over sixty years by a retired surgeon and his wife, is devoted entirely to ceramics from Puebla and Oaxaca, including several hundred pieces of blue-and-white talavera arranged by colour across nine rooms. The surgeon's granddaughter conducts tours herself on Saturday mornings. She is funny, opinionated and will insist that you drink a cup of hot chocolate afterwards.
In Roma Norte, the Colección Ibarra occupies the ground floor of an Art Nouveau apartment building and focuses on textiles: rebozos, huipiles and ceremonial weavings from across the country, some more than two centuries old. The pieces hang in glass-fronted cabinets that the founder, a former fashion buyer, designed herself. Visits are by written request, answered within a week, and limited to six people at a time. It is worth every minute of the wait.
Worth the detour
Two lesser-known addresses repay the journey to San Rafael, a neighbourhood of faded mansions and busy taquerías. Casa Tipográfica Lumbre is a former printing works turned museum of Mexican graphic design, with posters, matchbox labels and hand-lettered shop signs covering every wall. A few streets away, the Fundación Serrano Ruiz shows modernist furniture in a house designed by its founder's father in 1952, preserved almost exactly as the family left it, down to the magazines on the coffee table.
Finally, and most elusive, there is the Gabinete Mireles in the south of the city, a single room of natural history specimens, antique maps and scientific instruments gathered by three generations of the same family. It opens on the first Sunday of each month. There is no booking system; you simply ring the bell and hope. If the owner, a retired astronomer, is in a good mood, he will show you the brass telescope on the roof.
A private collection is really a portrait of the person who made it. You are walking through somebody's curiosity. — Lucía Villaseñor
A few practical notes. Carry cash, since most of these places charge a modest entry fee and few accept cards. Dress for courtyards, which can be cool in the morning and hot by noon. Above all, be patient and polite: these are homes before they are museums, and the reward for good manners is often an invitation to linger long after the official visit has ended.
