RAQUELGuardia

About

the storyso far.

I'm Raquel — a designer, a cook, and a wanderer between two deserts. This is the longer story of how one corridor — Arizona and Mexico City — became a whole life: a journal, a kitchen, a little black book, and a weekly dispatch from the road.

Raquel Guardia — designer, cook, and writer between Arizona and Mexico City
Raquel Guardia's studio — color and art from the Arizona to Mexico City corridor

Where it began

A corridor between two deserts.

My eye was formed along a single corridor: the artisan workshops of Mexico City, where hand-carved mesquite and volcanic stone are treated as architecture — and the mineral restraint of the Arizona desert, where adobe, sandstone, and raw clay shape a language of honest material. I learned early that color isn't decoration; it's a held breath.

From there came everything else — a practice, a few brands, a journal that won't sit still, and a kitchen table that's never empty for long.

"We do not decorate. We compose — planes of color, shafts of light, the honest weight of stone."

— Raquel Guardia

Guardia Designs interior by Raquel Guardia — desert design between Arizona and Mexico City

What I make

A few little worlds, one person behind them.

Guardia Designs — interiors built for real living. StellaSimone — skincare as ritual and salon systems. Koffin Coffee — small-batch roasting with a romantic streak. A real-estate portfolio of homes with good bones and better light. Each began as a feeling I couldn't shake, and somehow became a practice.

Alongside the work, I travel, I photograph, I cook, and I collect — and I share it all here, because a life this colorful shouldn't be kept in folders.

What inspires me

the things that feed the work.

01

Polanco

Where color is treated as architecture, not decoration.

02

Desert light

The restraint of the Sonoran sky at dusk.

03

Long tables

Food as the way I tell people I love them.

04

Vinyl & static

A soundtrack for every room I walk into.

05

Honest material

Lime plaster, travertine, hand-fired clay.

06

The makers

The hands behind every object I bring home.

A few questions

aboutme.

01

Who was your greatest influence?

My grandmother. She taught me that a home isn't finished until it holds a life — and that color belongs everywhere, even in the places people forget to look.

02

Whom do you admire as an artist?

I'm obsessed with Frida Kahlo. She painted her own body, her own pain, her own garden and made the personal universal. That fearlessness is everything to me.

03

What's the first color you remember?

The burnt orange reflected in our carpet and the desert lithograph on the wall. I've been chasing that warmth ever since.

04

If you could only cook one meal forever?

Mole negro, hand-ground, the slow way. It takes two days and feeds the whole street — that's my idea of a good Sunday.

05

What do you pack that nobody else does?

A small watercolor set and a pocket speaker. I paint what I see, and I soundtrack the doing of it.

06

Best piece of advice you've been given?

"Don't decorate. Compose." My grandmother again. She was right about most things.

comealong.

The cookbook is open for pre-order, the weekly dispatch is free to read, and the contact form is always open for rooms, collaborations, and cups of coffee.

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