A Marvelous Mérida Maisonette

[If you’re just zooming in, I’ve been desolating the internet landscape with recollections of our recent trip to Mérida, Mexico for a week now]

There I go with the French again. It’s just not done in Yucatan. But no other word can describe our little rental house in Mérida as accurately as maisonette, or at least none with the amount of alliteration I require for my headlines. The only thing better than alliteration in a title is some succulent sentence sibilance, and we ain’t got any.

Pied-à-terre falls short of describing the housing stock in the Barrio Santiago where we were staying, although it’s close. Translated, it means “foot on the ground.” I think it does, anyway. French class was a very long time ago. Sorry. It refers to an apartment you keep empty but ready for occasional trips into the metrop. New York used to be full of them, for instance. A goodly portion of the city’s apartments were empty for most of the year. I think the internet killed the pied-à-terre concept dead. Everything that can produce a revenue stream, produces a revenue stream. A goodly portion of the Barrio Santiago neighborhood is for rent at any given time.

People think up new ways to refer to old things. “Grab an Uber” has replaced “calling a taxi” for a lot of people. “An AirBnB” has replaced any reference to a hotel room in many people’s lingo haversack as well. But modern euphemisms often mask underlying facts, many of the unfortunate variety. Ask a Millennial if they aspire to live in a tiny house. You betcha, that’s awesome! How about a single-wide? No way, that sucks!

We at the Cottage are not immune to such shifts in nomenclature. We did the Air BnB thing, only using their competitor, VSOP, TSOP, or VTOL, or whatever it’s called. And the last thing we would call our digs, but what it really is, is a time-share condo. It’s ever so much more flexible, and you don’t have to buy in forever, but the idea is the same, with social media thrown in.

In the city center of Merida, the houses are almost always attached. They show a variegated but unbroken wall of facades fronting the streets. Like this:

It’s very European to my eye, and medieval, with more than a dash of Classical Antiquity thrown in. Forget about judging these books by their covers. We discovered that you can’t really tell what’s going on inside any particular residence by looking at the front of it. It’s common for the houses to be only 10 or 12-feet wide, and 150 feet deep. There are interior courtyards, and pools, and gardens, and guest houses, and not a hint of any of it visible to passersby. There are literal palaces in this town that look as nondescript outside as that mustard-yellow job in the last photo.

Here is our little place. The hosts call it the Casa Gatita. The front (blue) is entirely covered with a steel louvered grate. Some form of wrought iron or steel gate is common, almost universal down there:

The man-door in it is open a skosh. The entire gate is a garage door, with an electric opener. You can park on the street, but they’re crowded and skinny. Lots of people have garages like this. Do you have a garage like this? I doubt it. This one is tiled:

It’s not really a garage. It’s more accurate to call it a gated forecourt, but whatever it is, it’s pretty nifty. The flooring is called pasta tiles. I believe the European version of this is called encaustic tile. They’re similarly durable and attractive and wonderful. [Jeez, the uploader has already pulled the video. Here’s a pretty similar process from a guy in Egypt]

Pasta tiles were popular around the turn of the twentieth century, when a lot of the houses in Mérida were built. Realtors point them out as especially desirable finishes in restored homes. They’re nearly indestructible, and amazingly vibrant and colorful. Carpets are basically unusable in Yucatan. It’s too hot and damp. So the patterns and colors you might get with a rug, they get with tile floors.

I’ve already told you that Mérida is quite safe. So what’s with the locking gates on the houses? The city seems to have the same vibe as the old Russian proverb, Doveryay, no proveryay. That means “trust, but verify.” In some ways it reminds me of many people in Maine. They’re very friendly, but they mind their own business for the most part. The gates perform that most useful function in decent environs: they signal to your friends that you’re not home.

In the second picture above, you can see a true Yucatan doorway. It’s really old, but restored nicely. It allows a series of different opening schemes to let in the desired amount of light, breezes, and street views, along with the amount of privacy you want on a door that faces a street. Here it is from the interior:

The denizens of Merida lived here for a long time without air conditioning. It routinely gets well over 100-degrees, but they knew how to manage the temps pretty well. The houses are massive masonry affairs. Everything is either concrete, block, or parged rubble stone. The walls are really thick, and absorb a lot of heat during the day and meter it back in at night. The ceilings are very high, and airy, with lots of fans to get a draft going. And even though the houses are mostly only one or two-rooms wide, they get air to pass right through them if they can. Here’s the vestibule just inside the door:

Straight on through to the kitchen and living area.

There’s a big bedroom upstairs, with a full bath, and a half bath under the stairs in the foyer. Out the back, there’s this:

That’s open to the sky, with an indoor/outdoor area in the foreground. There’s a laundry room behind the mural that gives the house its name. Splash pools like this are popular in Mérida. The mural is not just a put-on. We sat outside in the evening, and watched cats commuting over the rooftops and parapet walls, pausing only to give us dirty looks on the way by.

Everything was included in the price of the rental, but you’ll have to bring your own girl with you if you visit the joint. I took the one in the picture home with me.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting and buying my book and hitting the tip jar. It is greatly appreciated]