A suspended fireplace hangs at the center of the double-height living room at Mesa de Gallos, a mountain residence in Avándaro, Mexico. Nearly every other decision in the interior is arranged around it. Interior designer Mariana Rivera completed the project in 2025 inside a house designed by Estudio Ogarrio Arquitectos and CHK Arquitectura.
The double height came from the architects, and Rivera treated it as the organizing element for the social areas. Because the fireplace hangs free of the floor and walls, seating can approach it from more than one side. The furniture groups that form around it act as rooms within a single open volume. Each group holds its own arrangement while sightlines run uninterrupted between living, dining, and circulation, so the house never has to be divided with partitions to feel inhabitable at its scale.
Mountain retreats commonly lean on a rustic vocabulary of heavy logs, carved detail, and dense ornament. Rivera kept the timber and stone that place this house in a pine forest but pared the furniture and finishes back to simple, low forms. Weathered wood lines the walls and ceilings below exposed timber trusses. Because the boards arrive already gray and softened, further exposure registers as gradual change instead of damage. Stacked stone walls frame the main entrance, and Santo Tomás marble carries the same mineral weight indoors. Dark-finished steel supplies the thin, precise lines that timber of this weight cannot produce.
The furniture was chosen to keep conversation going across these distances. Pieces from Molteni and Audo Copenhagen sit alongside campaign-style designs by Richard Wrightman, whose leather and wood frames carry the same worn quality as the wall cladding. Bouclé upholstery and natural-fiber textiles soften the hard surfaces and absorb some of the sound that a double-height room of wood and stone would otherwise return.
