Mexican wave: a brutalist shrine to hand-crafted design

This striking concrete house in Mexico City is full of local artists’ furniture and artwork

What does a house from the future look like? The Mexican sculptor and architect Pedro Reyes thought long and hard about what it means to build a house in the 21st century, away from a canon of modernity, classical styles and fleeting trends. He and his wife, fashion designer Carla Fernández, also wanted to avoid the usual type of architecture you find in Mexico, because “so much of it ends up looking the same”.

The result is this “future cave” – an amalgam of modern and ancient, where brutalist architecture is made from concrete in varying degrees of coarseness and yet the human hand, visible in layers of centuries-old, artisanal craft – furniture, artwork – is also evident. Minimal this is not.