Museo Casa Kahlo Opens Up Frida Kahlo’s Private World
Set within Casa Roja on a tree-lined block in Mexico City, the newly opened museum reveals the late artist’s innermost dimensions through a family home reimagined by Rockwell Group and Mariana Doet Zepeda Orozco with deep sensitivity for history and scale
Casa Roja, the low-slung brick house nestled along a tree-lined street in Coyoacán that long belonged to Frida Kahlo’s sister Cristina, offered the artist a sheltered refuge far removed from the turbulent public life she shared with Diego Rivera. Frida’s parents originally purchased the house, and she later acquired it for Cristina and her family as a close-at-hand retreat steps from Casa Azul. Within its walls, the sisters founded La Ayuda, a nonprofit that supported hundreds of single mothers, many from Indigenous communities. Generations of Kahlo women passed the house down until Frida’s grandniece, Mara Romeo, took stewardship and lived there through 2023. That backstory makes Casa Roja uniquely suited to house the recently opened Museo Casa Kahlo.
Located within the very rooms that shaped Frida beyond her public persona, Museo Casa Kahlo invites visitors into the artist’s early life and creative years to reveal her innermost dimensions previously shared only within her tight-knit family circle. The museum traces the relationships that molded her worldview and supported her emergence as one of the 20th century’s most recognized cultural figures—and situates that story within the walls where it unfolded. “Opening Museo Casa Kahlo is, above all, a family endeavor,” explains Mara Romeo Kahlo. “I feel so fortunate to be doing this vast project alongside my daughters, Mara De Anda Romeo and Frida Hentschel Romeo, inside our family home. To welcome the public into these spaces is, for us, a tribute to the Kahlo family’s tradition of hospitality.”
Still organized as a family residence, the museum contains private rooms that present original family objects alongside interpretive displays. A preserved kitchen showcases Frida’s only known mural, which depicts a young grapefruit tree that now grows in the courtyard. In the basement lies a secluded hideaway where Frida wrote and painted in creative solitude. Elsewhere, a dedicated gallery examines her commitments, including La Ayuda and “Los Fridos,” the circle of students who sustained ties with the family even decades later.
To realize this vision, the museum’s founders commissioned architect Mariana Doet Zepeda Orozco, with experience and exhibition design by Rockwell Group. According to firm founder and president David Rockwell, the central challenge involved protecting the home’s emotional and physical scale while introducing the circulation, accessibility, and infrastructure required for a public museum. “Casa Roja was never meant to be a public space, so we approached our design with a light touch, ensuring the architecture and visitor journey honored that sense of intimacy,” he explains. “Every intervention, from arrival to the courtyard, was designed to feel like a continuation of the family’s story.”
Guests enter Museo Casa Kahlo from the street, just as Frida and her family once did. The former driveway now exists as a narrow passage that leads to an open-air courtyard, where the grapefruit tree rises from a hand-carved Cantera stone vessel. Set into the stone floor before it, a carved motif reproduces one of Cristina Kahlo’s personal rugs once placed at the entryway to beckon visitors inside. The architects also reinstated a curved corner stair, where the Kahlos often gathered for family portraits before earlier renovations removed it. As Rockwell notes, the stair and stonework “weave together a portrait of family life.”
That intimate tableau takes shape amid a dynamic field of ceramic planters fashioned by regional artisans. “We embarked on a wide-ranging curation to source local ceramics,” Rockwell says. “Since the emergence of the Olmec culture, considered to be the mother of the Mesoamerican cultures, ceramics and pottery making have taken an important place in the lives of the Mexican people.” Green clay vessels curated by Botéo draw from Oaxaca’s Atzompa tradition, a centuries-old style practiced by Indigenous women-led workshops. Red clay planters by Artesanías El Alcatraz reflect Tonalá pottery traditions—petatillo (fine etched red clay), betus (resin-coated, vividly painted ceramics), and canelo or bruñido (burnished clay with natural pigments) among them—and lend the garden further tonal richness.
Perhaps the museum’s most affecting moment, however, arrives in the recreation of Frida’s basement. The candlelit retreat presents the private sanctuary where she wrote and painted at her own speed. Original objects, furniture, and textiles abound, including her desk, paintings, dolls, and a small insect collection, alongside photographs and letters recounting familial tales across generations. “The basement retreat was really extraordinary to encounter for the first time, knowing that it was this intimate world that few even knew existed,” says Rockwell, who worked closely with the family and curatorial team to reconstruct the room using archival references and personal accounts. Drawing from Kahlo’s original sketches and photographs of butterflies and insects, the LAB at Rockwell Group even created a replica microscope that allows visitors to peer inside and observe the same specimens that captured her curiosity.
Throughout Museo Casa Kahlo, sensitive curatorial choices and subtle design interventions frame the experience as a return to the familiar rooms and shared routines that defined Frida’s creative ingenuity and unbreakable bond with her family. As Mara Romeo Kahlo explains, “This museum honors the spirit of family, generosity, and creativity that has been passed down to us—and extends Frida Kahlo’s legacy for future generations.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Winter issue under the headline “Collage Course.” Subscribe to the magazine.