Posh Polanco, Mexico City and its Arts Scene
- Mar 17
- 7 min read
My inquiries for Mexico City have been increasing, and the posh and arty Mexico City neighborhood of Polanco is a must for its arts scene alone. I love when historic buildings like old mansions are converted to luxury hotels, and Casa Polanco is a gorgeous place to stay to immerse yourself in this neighborhood.
Virtuoso article below from 1/12/2026 by Alexandra Owens can be found HERE.
A new wave of modern design is heating up in Polanco.
On first impression, Polanco feels a little like the Upper East Side, as friends had told me it would. It’s one of Mexico City’s most lavish neighborhoods, complete with Michelin-starred darlings (Pujol, Quintonil), high-end retail (its jacaranda-lined Avenida Presidente Masaryk sports Gucci, Ferragamo, and Hermès, plus other haute heavy hitters), and coveted real estate. Stay elsewhere on your first CDMX trip, some friends (not so gently) suggested. But Polanco was exactly where I wanted to be.
Mexico City’s recent tourism boom and rising middle class have brought fresh interest (and investment) to its art and design scene – and Polanco is right in the middle of it. Beyond the tony colonia’s busy Avenida Presidente Masaryk, a fresh wave of indie shops, galleries, and hotels are marrying Mexican heritage and modern design. I wanted to see the neighborhood’s traditional-meets-contemporary core, and with the right people by my side, it would be easy to tap into the best of it.
Polanco has always been a bastion of creativity, architect Gerardo Hernández Septién tells me as we wander through the open-air Pasaje Polanco shopping complex. In 1938, 18 years after the end of the Mexican Revolution, a new bourgeoisie founded the residential colonia about four miles northwest of the city center. They had reinvention in mind.
“If you take a picture in Mexico City’s center and tell people you went to Milan, they may believe you. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century palacios there look so European,” Hernández Septién says. “But houses in Polanco have Mexican baroque features from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”
The neighborhood fell out of fashion for a period in the 1970s – its elaborate single-family mansions, with their Puebla tiles and carved-stone facades, were expensive and hard to maintain. Many were left to eccentric grandparents as younger generations moved on. But over the past couple of decades, new creatives have moved in. Contemporary art gallery Proyectos Monclova opened in Polanco in 2005; the owners chose the neighborhood to attract serious buyers. Polanco’s proximity to some of Mexico City’s best art museums, including Museo Jumex and Museo Tamayo, didn’t hurt either. “Polanco brings together the best of contemporary art, design, gastronomy, and architecture,” says Proyectos Monclova’s sales director Alexandra Lovera. “People here are genuinely engaged with creative industries.”
The gallery, which showcases primarily Mexican artists, is my first stop in getting to know Polanco’s cultural highlights with art historian and extremely well-connected local Lucía Arredondo. I’m drawn to a tower of 28 piedras de cantera (quarry stones) embellished with hand-carved monarch butterflies by the late Ángela Gurría, who in 1973 became the first woman to join Mexico’s Academy of Arts. The piece anchors a dual retrospective of Gurría and Helen Escobedo, another of the country’s most significant women sculptors, known for her monumental public installations. Upstairs with Arredondo, Lovera shows us a Technicolor work by Eduardo Terrazas, whose art takes inspiration from the meticulous Huichol technique of gluing yarn to a wooden board with wax. Up close, its tiny fibers twist and collide with precision.
Longtime Polanco resident and businessman Octavio Aguilar has leaned into the neighborhood’s revitalization too, opening the boutique hotel Casa Polanco in 2022 in a 1940s baroque mansion overlooking the Parque Lincoln. A rigorous restoration added a contemporary wing but preserved many of the home’s original details, from its arched doorways to its curlicued wrought-iron balconies. His personal art collection fills the hotel: photographs by Graciela Iturbide, known for her representation of Oaxaca’s Indigenous Zapotec community; abstract oil paintings by Ricardo Mazal; and various objets d’art, many sourced from Polanco’s antiques shops and markets. “My grandfather was an art collector, and he and my mother loved architecture,” Aguilar says. “I think I have some of that in my DNA.”
Casa Polanco encourages guests to tap into the neighborhood’s cultural institutions, connecting them with local artists and guides for private tours and talks. Over coffee and chilaquiles in the hotel’s two-story, glass-roofed atrium, Cristina Artigas – founder of Mexico City’s Modernism Week and granddaughter of architect Francisco Artigas – hypes up Polanco’s renewed appreciation for Mexican craftsmanship and architecture. “A new generation of creatives is driving the buzz here,” she says. “Nostalgia plays a big role in how we experience Mexican design today. It’s not about looking backward, but about carrying that warmth and authenticity into the present.”
Design firm Clásicos Mexicanos beautifully conveys that appreciation for the past, reproducing original furniture from some of the country’s most influential midcentury-modern designers, in collaboration with their families and estates. In the middle of its intimate showroom, a dining set first created by architect Ricardo Legorreta in 1972 for a Puerto Vallarta hotel gestures to the country’s cultural identity through woven palm details on the chairs and conical pinewood legs. Nearby, a soft leather-and-wood lounge chair, designed in 1955 by another architect, Antonio Attolini Lack, combines an intentional mix of Bauhaus and brutalist-era inspirations.
“Mexico’s midcentury furniture was deeply linked to architecture and based on custom commissions instead of large-scale production,” says Clásicos Mexicanos’ general director Juliette Frey. “So it remained largely invisible internationally.”
At multidisciplinary home goods studio Onora, owner-designers Maggie Galton and María Eladia Hagerman collaborate with artisans from 28 Mexican states to preserve and celebrate their traditional crafts. The etched details on a glossy barro negro (black clay) figurine of a stout tlalchichi (a now-extinct dog breed favored by the Aztecs) remind me of my visit to Polanco’s National Museum of Anthropology the previous day. It’s home to the world’s largest collection of ancient Mexican artifacts, including a monumental Aztec sun stone calendar and Olmec heads carved with little more than sand, rope, water, and sheer determination.
I end up on a terrace, as one should always do in a sunny, new-to-them big city. At Xinú, a Mexico City-based perfumery inspired by plants endemic to the Americas, I spritz scents incorporating orange blossom, marigold, and palo santo in the shop’s lush (and equally fragrant) terrace garden. The boutique’s interior is like a seductive, life-size terrarium, with display cases containing local plants, avant-garde fragrances beneath glass cloches, and botanical sketches on the walls.
The nods to Mexican heritage serve as a through line at every stop. At the studio showroom of Héctor Esrawe, the multidisciplinary designer’s Magma lamp (a collaboration with EWE Studio) is hand-blown in molds carved from Mexican volcanic stone and glows hypnotically. Hanging on the metal racks at Ikal, clothing from Amor & Rosas, PDA, and Regina Dondé, who collaborates with Mexico’s artisan communities to create her bold resortwear, invites intentional shopping.
When I spend time closer to the city center in the Roma and Condesa neighborhoods, where locals have recently staged anti-gentrification protests, I feel like I’m in a different Mexico City. Tourists snap selfies in front of jewel-toned buildings, while a line snakes down the street at a TikTok-famous concha bakery. No one would call Polanco a secret – there are plenty of travelers toting Chanel shopping bags and groups lingering outside buzzy, World’s Best cocktail bars – but the vibe remains a little more chilled out. “There’s a continuity to Polanco that keeps the neighborhood’s identity intact,” Artigas says.
Roaming through Polanco’s Bomboti – a three-story trove of Mexican art, design, crafts, and gourmet goods from architect designers Andrés Mier y Terán and Regina Galvanduque – makes me hungry. I’m craving a $32,000 Gabriela Flores Morales side table, or maybe just some tacos. So I make my way to laid-back taqueria El Turix, where a woman in front of me fishes a few crumpled pesos out of her Birkin to pay for her cochinita pibil torta. In Polanco, past and present – and glitz and comfort food – share an address.
Where to Shop and See Art in Polanco
Proyectos Monclova owners Teófilo Cohen and David Trabulsi have championed emerging and established Latin American (especially Mexican) artists for more than 20 years.
Reproductions of midcentury-modern furniture from ten of Mexico’s most notable designers and architects fill Clásicos Mexicanos’ tucked-away showroom.
Onora sources its limited-edition selections of dinnerware, throw pillows, ceramic candelabras, and other housewares from artisans across Mexico.
In sleek, wood-stoppered, handblown glass bottles resembling an hourglass, Xinú’s six signature perfumes look as sexy as they smell.
Next door to Xinú, Héctor Esrawe’s studio delights with illuminated steel sculptures, wooden bookshelves, and more of his ultramodern designs.
Ikal anchors its Polanco outpost with colorful blouses, dresses, and swimsuits (plus a playful selection of ceramics) from over 100 Mexican and Latin American brands.
There’s a souvenir for everyone back home at Bomboti. Dedicate at least an hour to the multidisciplinary space’s robust collection of furniture, artwork, fair-trade sundries, and more.
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