Tlacotalpan Residencias by Tenter Estudio & Masa Studio is a four-unit residential project in Roma Sur, Mexico City, organized within a three-story height limit on a compact urban site. Through a system of courtyards, transverse divisions, and restrained material contrasts, the building concentrates density while preserving domestic independence, natural ventilation, and a calibrated relationship with the neighborhood fabric.
Tlacotalpan Residences Technical Information
- ArchitectsTenter Estudio & Masa Studio
- LocationRoma Sur, Mexico City, Mexico
- Gross Area700 m2 | 7,535 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2025
- Photographs© Zaickz Moz
The height restriction was not treated as a limit, but as the framework that structures the organization, privacy, and spatial character of the whole.
– Tenter Estudio
Urban Constraint as Spatial Framework
Tlacotalpan Residencias is shaped by a regulatory condition common to many consolidated urban districts: a strict three-story height limit. Rather than treating this condition as a residual constraint, the project uses it as a compositional rule to distribute 700 square meters of construction across a 200-square-meter plot. The result is a low-rise residential density that depends less on vertical stacking and more on sectional negotiation, interior voids, and carefully defined thresholds.
In Roma Sur, where the urban fabric is characterized by varied domestic scales, street trees, and continuous alignments, the building avoids excessive formal assertion. Its mass follows the neighborhood’s height and street edge, allowing densification without producing a disruptive object. This restraint is especially evident in the street facade, where a dark charcoal surface recedes behind a mature sidewalk tree. The architecture does not compete with the existing vegetation; it allows it to remain the dominant element in the public foreground.
The entrance is treated as a precise cut into the dark exterior volume. Lined in warm horizontal timber across floor, walls, and ceiling, the portal creates a controlled transition from the public sidewalk to the interior domestic sequence. Small recessed lights and a secondary timber door reinforce the entry as a threshold rather than a facade feature. This contrast between the mute exterior plane and the tactile timber passage establishes the project’s central spatial concern: privacy is not achieved through withdrawal alone, but through layered movement between street, threshold, courtyard, and room.
Courtyards, Voids, and Domestic Independence
The plan begins with a transverse division of the site, separating three apartments from a townhouse. This strategy prevents the project from reading as a compact block of repeated units. Each dwelling receives a distinct access condition and a legible degree of autonomy, even while sharing the same parcel. In a city where small-lot housing often risks becoming either overly compartmentalized or overly generic, the division gives the project a clear internal order.
Three courtyards structure the complex. They provide daylight, ventilation, and planted spatial relief, but their role is not only environmental. They also organize movement and perception, interrupting the plan’s density with vertical voids that allow each unit to be read as a defined volume. Double-height spaces, skylights, glazed bridges, and black slat screens modulate visibility between dwellings, creating moments of proximity without direct exposure.
The courtyards function as internal landscapes. Board-formed concrete, microcement surfaces, stone paving, and dense planting form a sequence of shaded exterior rooms embedded within the housing. Tropical foliage climbs and spills from planters, softening the hard edges of the voids while filtering light across walls and windows. These planted spaces are not decorative additions; they are part of the project’s environmental infrastructure, drawing air and light into the interiors while establishing a measured relationship between openness and domestic privacy.
Interior Organization and Flexible Living
The residences are organized around generous living areas rather than subdivided cellular rooms. This planning approach corresponds to contemporary urban households that value adaptability, larger shared spaces, and proximity to outdoor rooms. Living rooms, dining areas, and kitchens are arranged as continuous domestic zones, often extending toward patios or courtyards through sliding glass openings and framed views. The compactness of the site is countered by visual depth rather than by excessive area.
The kitchens demonstrate this strategy clearly. In one unit, a double-height kitchen pairs oak cabinetry with a matte-black island, allowing the room to serve as both a functional core and a spatial anchor. In another, sliding black-framed glass opens directly to a planted courtyard, making the kitchen part of a larger environmental sequence. These arrangements avoid treating service areas as secondary spaces. Instead, cooking, dining, and gathering are placed in direct relation to light, planting, and vertical volume.
Circulation is also developed as an architectural sequence. Narrow microcement corridors, concrete stairs, glazed bridges, and framed views toward foliage introduce pauses within the dense footprint. A sculptural concrete stair, set between oak-paneled walls and a board-formed concrete shaft, reinforces the project’s sectional nature. Movement through the building is therefore not merely connective; it produces alternating moments of compression and release, using material shifts and courtyard views to orient the resident within a complex yet controlled plan.
Material Continuity and Atmospheric Depth
The material palette is limited but carefully calibrated. Exposed and board-formed concrete define structural and vertical elements, while microcement extends a continuous mineral surface through corridors and transitional spaces. Warm plaster moderates the interiors, oak joinery provides tactile depth, and travertine or marble surfaces introduce a quieter grain underfoot. Black steel appears in screens, frames, sliding doors, and railings, producing a consistent edge condition throughout the project.
The exterior relies on the tension between dark surfaces and warm timber. The dark facade and black slat screens create a recessive urban presence, while the timber-lined portal and interior oak surfaces signal a shift in scale and touch. This contrast is not merely visual. It marks the transition from city to dwelling, from protective enclosure to inhabited surface, and from collective frontage to individual domestic access.
Lighting and planting deepen the spatial atmosphere. Indirect cove lighting washes ceilings and plaster walls, while recessed fixtures and globe lights clarify thresholds, stairs, and niches without overwhelming the rooms. Vertical planting, courtyard trees, and cascading vines introduce color, texture, and seasonal change into the concrete and plaster enclosure. In this context, greenery operates as an architectural material with spatial consequences: it filters views, marks the passage of time, and helps transform a compact residential site into a layered domestic environment.
About Tenter Studio
Tenter Estudio is the architecture practice of Felix Villasenor. For Tlacotalpan Residencias in Roma Sur, Mexico City, the studio developed a contained multi-family housing project organized through courtyards, precise spatial divisions, material restraint, and a close relationship between domestic privacy, natural light, ventilation, and the surrounding urban fabric.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Construction company: Tenter Estudio
- Design Principles: Félix Villaseñor (Tenter Estudio) and Mario Sada (Masa Studio)
- Architecture Team: Zaira Andere, Eduardo Mendoza, Ana Paola Aquino
- Suppliers: Corev, Marmex, Interceramic, Illux, Novaceramic
- Photography: Zaickz Moz
- Press agency: MOSS Agency
