Erika Krutzfeldt is a graphic designer and interior designer, and she lives in La Condesa, Mexico City. She shares her home with her cat Keiju, a Finnish name that means fairy. ‘Feel free to do whatever you want, but with moderation’ is advice that was passed on to her by her father and has now become a motto she tries to live by.

Born in Mexico, Erika spent ten years living in La Paz, Bolivia with her family before returning to Mexico. She studied graphic design at the University of Guadalajara for five years and started working as one after that. Two years ago she went to Barcelona and studied interior design at
a design school for one year.

“When I came back I went to an astrologer,” she tells me. “The astrologer was a very old woman who lives here in Mexico City. She told me that I had a gift for healing spaces. That inspired me so much that my next project is going to be using this concept. Healing spaces to me means to create well-being. By freeing up spaces, rearranging objects, regrouping, adding or removing pieces, you can create a whole new way of perceiving a space. A home is a state of the soul.”

Her way of arranging her own furniture and decorating her apartment sets a good example. The furniture is not routinely aligned with the walls. Instead the living room furniture is angled, making the room look both interesting and inviting. A distinct feature is the warm yellow colour on the rear wall that stops abruptly a bit into the adjacent wall. This colour is actually just a continuation of the patio wall on the other side of the large floor-to-ceiling window, and painting the living room wall in the same shade makes these two spaces interconnect.

“My style could best be described as colourful and folkloristic, in the sense of crafted things of mixed of origins,” she says. “And I like furniture from the 50s and have quite a few pieces from that era. I like crafts and old things that have a soul. What I don’t like is mass-produced things that have come directly from a factory, but things that have had a previous life and have a story to tell.”

This is an excerpt from the book Home Life Around the World and is one of the unique and personal homes I visited.

Release date 15th May.
Home Life Around the World is available for pre-order in iBooks store, Kobo and Google Play. ISBN 978-91-984455-1-0
The book is also available for pre-order in the Kindle format. ASIN: B079VDPBVF
Print edition ISBN 978-91-984455-0-3

Copyright and photo: Anita Martinez Beijer