Our apartment in Mexico City is on the sixth floor of a newly built six-story building in Mexico City’s Roma Norte neighborhood, on the corner of Cordoba and Cualihila. This is the extreme southern border of Roma Norte—the northern boundary of Roma Sur is a block to the south—and towards the neighborhood’s eastern edge.
Location-wise, it’s next to perfect. All of our (current) favorite restaurants, bars, and shops in Roma Norte are short 5-to-15-minute walks away, and the closest Metro stop—Hospital General—is just 7 minutes by foot. You can walk to the desirable Hippodrome area of Condessa in less than 15 minutes as well, opening up a whole new selection of choices. Centro is about 10 minutes by Uber, and we can get to the airport in about 20 minutes.
The apartment is small, maybe a bit smaller than we’d hoped for at about 750 square feet. It consists of three main rooms, a combined living space and kitchen, and two bedrooms, and there are two three-quarter bathrooms and a laundry closet. There’s also a long balcony, accessible from both bedrooms, that faces south.
It’s on the top floor of the westernmost of the building’s two towers, but there is a shared space above us that’s open to the air. This space has storage closets for each of the apartments, which are called bodegas, and through a quirk of fate— it’s in the corner—ours is the biggest. We also have one parking space in the basement parking garage, but we’ll never use it as we don’t plan to buy a car.
The building is new, as noted, and constructed of concrete, and it meets the modern standards for being earthquake-proof. The floors in the living space and laundry are marble, but the bedrooms have serviceable faux wood floors.
Having never been inhabited, the apartment was empty when we arrived save for a small kitchen with a surprisingly nice oven in the back corner of the living space and some built-ins in each bedroom.
Thanks to its location, it is the second-most expensive apartment in the building after the two-floor penthouse, at $280,000. By comparison, the apartment on the floor below us, which is otherwise identical, cost $271,000. We considered it, but we like the idea of not having anyone above us. (That said, anyone in the apartment building can use the shared space, of course, with reasonable limits.)
Of course, there’s more money to spend. We need a refrigerator, various kitchen items, a washer (which will go in the laundry), beds, desks, living room furniture, a TV, and various towels, linens, and other items. We have rough ideas about how we’ll use the space when we’re working, which is based on our years of experience doing home swaps. The second bedroom will need to be dual-use as a home office, too, for example.
But we’ll get to all that. For now, we’re just happy to have taken this huge step into the future. The other minor steps will come in time.
Eternal Spring 