In Mexico City, the taxis are pink. Hot pink. The streets are crammed with them, they honk, dart and weave their way across a wide, colourful city. And yet, within a day, you stop noticing them. Somehow, hot pink blends into the background. It becomes a neutral.

“Pink as a neutral” has been a personal colour philosophy ever since. 

It isn’t about the shade. It’s the warmth. A warmth and a can’t-quite-give-a-name-to-it
vibrancy that I felt and saw everywhere in Mexico City. It’s a mood that has become my north star for any design project. Shop Molly's palette here. 

I visited Mexico City in 2018. We landed at 5am and went straight from the plane to Café
Milou to watch the World Cup. We were meeting a fashion editor who, fifteen minutes into
our coffee, invited her friend Arantza to join us. Within the hour, we had been folded into
their plans for the weekend.

It was one of those weekends that words fail to explain. A weekend when you are
completely swept up in love and optimism and the pleasure of being alive, and having very
little responsibility. A weekend that I know our girls will one day roll their eyes at when we
start talking about “that time in Mexico”, but I can’t wait to do it anyway.

I believe travel inspires design, but the trick, or the art, as we all seem to say now, is in the
translation. How do you bring home the feeling of a place, rather than simply recreating the look? 

We have lived in our house for four years now and are slowly transforming it into our
home. It is a Victorian terrace whose previous owner had lived there for 60 years and had
an eye-watering collection of art, but apparently no need for hot water from the shower.
We had grand plans for side-return extensions and basement transformations, but the
arrival of our two girls, followed by a series of re-plumbing and piping sagas, meant
budgets were reconfigured and a more manageable kitchen decorating project ensued.
The new brief became: how do we create the warmth of Mexico inside a Victorian house in London?

For the record, the kitchen is the only modern space in the house. It was added by the
previous owner and has modern lighting and none of the features found in the rest of the
house. I didn’t want to draw attention to that, but nor did I want to try to fake them.
A fluorescent-pink kitchen, à la Luis Barragán, was never going to feel quite right for us in
London. But against grey skies, a muddier pink paired with black felt chic, warm and
surprisingly neutral.

I am also somewhat obsessed with the Victorians, their maximalism, Gothic Revival and
general conviction that a bare surface was in rather bad taste. I found a lamp at Kempton
that somehow spoke to my Mexican pot (a souvenir I lugged home as hand luggage), and
then spent weeks playing with COAT’s pinks (there are many), browns and blacks, working
out how to make those worlds sit together.

I very nearly went with a Mrs Bouquet and Sonder pairing, until my daughter came in and
announced that for her birthday she dreamt of everything being “pink, pink”. I couldn’t
resist the Dirty Sherbet. The result isn’t a Mexican kitchen in London. I didn’t want it to be. Instead, I wanted to take home what Mexico had given me: the confidence to use colour,
and the challenge of making it feel like a neutral.

Perhaps that is what we really bring home from the places we love. Not a perfect replica,
but a colour, an object, a feeling, translated into something that feels as though it now
belongs to us. Shop Molly's palette. 

Written and photographed by Molly Goddard Jefferey