Casa Luis Barragán

From the street, the house is remarkably discreet. The façade gives little away. That restraint is part of the pleasure: Barragán understood that arrival could be a gradual change of state, with a building revealing itself through movement rather than a single grand gesture.

Completed in 1948, his home and studio in Mexico City brings together the practical business of living and an extraordinary sensitivity to light, colour and scale. Rough surfaces give light something to catch. A wall becomes a field of colour. Timber introduces warmth, while a view towards greenery changes the atmosphere of an interior without adding another object to it.

This is the kind of architecture we want to spend time with. The interest lies in relationships: a shadow against a bright plane, an intimate corner beside a taller space, the weight of a wall against the apparent lightness of a stair. There are lessons here for rooms of every size.

The house became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004 and is now a museum. Book a visit in advance and allow the experience to be slower than the photographs suggest. A picture can record the colour of a room. It takes time inside it to understand what that colour does.