A curated monthly dose of lifestyle, culture, and rhythm from San Miguel de Allende.
A bishop’s house, an artist’s studio, a hotel, and a set of tunnels. As Casa No Name changes hands again, its history keeps talking.
Cover photo by : ixo estudio
Note from the Editor: This is the piece we have wanted to write since the day SAVANT started. Casa No Name is one of the most historically significant and mystical houses in San Miguel still open to the public, and one of the least documented. For the first time in twelve years it is for sale, and the timing handed us the one thing nobody covering this house has ever had: an afternoon with the woman who has lived with it. She found the tunnel. She had the fresco looked at properly. She read Deborah Turbeville’s journals. Almost none of what follows exists anywhere online, because nobody has asked at this level.
“There are so many secrets inside this house,” she told us. “Like many.” She was not being coy.
For the better part of three centuries a house on Hernández Macías has been quietly absorbing the history of this city. It went up in the eighteenth century for the bishop, and it has been a private residence, an American photographer’s studio, and for the last nine years a six-room hotel with no front desk. Under its floor runs a tunnel. Around its patio runs a fresco by the hand that painted Atotonilco. It is now for sale for the first time in twelve years, which makes what happens next to it more consequential than what happens to almost any other building in Centro.
San Miguel grew outward from its churches, and this street grew up around the institutions: the seminary, the convent of the Immaculate Conception, the oldest churches in San Miguel de Allende that gave the block its reason to exist. The house first belonged to a bishop, Father Luis Felipe Neri de Alfaro, the same man who built the Santuario de Jesús Nazareno de Atotonilco a few kilometres north of town.
For a man of that standing the streets themselves were a problem. They were crowded and extremely public. So he went underneath them. A tunnel runs from below the house toward a nearby church, convent and cemetery, and the accounts describe it as furnished. Furnished. Not a passage, then. A room you reached without anyone watching you arrive.
Every second person in this town has a tunnel story. Casa No Name is one of the very few places where you can look straight down into one. Crews sinking a column for a bathroom during the restoration broke through the floor into it. The passage is still there, still open, and now lit from within. The floor above the opening is reinforced glass, so a guest can stand in the room and look down into a space nobody had walked through in two centuries.
That room has its own layer of history. It was Deborah Turbeville’s darkroom. It is now the Naia suite.
Around the full circuit of the central patio runs a painted cycle attributed to Antonio Martínez de Pocasangre, the same hand that filled Atotonilco, the sanctuary people call the Sistine Chapel of the Americas and the anchor of the region’s UNESCO designation. Alfaro built that church and Pocasangre painted it, and then the pair of them turned up here, in a private house, doing the same work at domestic scale.
The date usually given is 1812, though it comes from the property’s own file rather than from any published study. There does not appear to be one. A significant work by a significant painter has been sitting around a courtyard in Centro for two hundred years and nobody has written it up.
What is painted here is not what is painted there, either. At Atotonilco, Pocasangre gave the walls the life and Passion of Christ, the Last Judgment, the founding saints of the orders. Here the scenes come out of the Old Testament, a rarer choice for a patio and a harder one to explain. The imagery goes with it: pyramids, camels, desert, palm trees. Egypt as imagined from the Bajío, wrapped around a courtyard where somebody ate breakfast every morning.
For most of the last century almost nobody saw any of it. Deborah Turbeville kept it under a sheet of black linen to keep the sun off the pigment, and drew the cloth back only when she had someone in the house worth showing it to. Nobody ever wrote that down as conservation, and there is no record of her consulting anyone about it. She just understood what she had. Twenty years of shade is the reason the cycle came through the last century in the condition it did.
Turbeville moved in in 1985 and lived here more than twenty years. Her photographs hang in the Getty, the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou. She filled the rooms with her own visual language: cameras, picture frames, small monkey sculptures, journals in her handwriting, objects picked up and never explained to anyone. She photographed the house and published it with Rizzoli not long before she died, which is how it got the name it still answers to. Valentino came through those doors. So, the books suggest, did Jackie Onassis. She never married, had no children, left her estate to her foundation, and died of lung cancer in New York in 2013, two weeks after leaving San Miguel.
Her things are still in the house. Not roped off, not lit from below, just there, in the rooms and along the corridors: the globe given to her by a cousin of the Romanovs, the campaign bed said to have come from Napoleon’s army, the Gobelin tapestry that stayed on UNESCO’s advice, the small objects she never got round to explaining. Her darkroom equipment went to Instituto Allende under a comodato that can be recalled at any time, because her will was clear that she wanted her enlargers in front of students rather than in a vitrine. The old master bedroom is Deborah’s Suite now.
Before any of the restoration began, the current owner stayed in the empty house alone for ten days. No staff, no security, not even her children. Shamans from Veracruz and Oaxaca had already walked the rooms with copal, and in one room the smoke came back at them instead of going in.
“I stayed here alone with Deborah,” she says. “She never appeared. I asked her not to. And she never came.”
She tells that story without asking anyone to believe it.
Before the shamans and Deborah’s ghost, the current owner had been looking at a small hotel in Tuscany. Not very seriously. Then she came to San Miguel, saw this house on a morning walk, and by that afternoon she had decided. She bought it three months after Turbeville died.
People told her she was crazy. The rooms were dark, the plumbing was improvised, and the atmosphere was heavy enough that visitors said so out loud.
Then she spent a year on the fresco. Carmen Rioja, the art historian and conservator who had worked at Atotonilco, led the restoration of the painting. Roberto Burillo, an architect deeply involved in San Miguel’s monument protection, took the structure. Between them they got permissions that are close to unobtainable here, which is why the house now has one contemporary Italian bathroom and a glass ceiling and is otherwise barely touched. The permits took two years on top of the work itself. Casa No Name opened as a hotel in December 2017, with six rooms and no front desk.
The rooftop is the hidden gem locals talk about, and the reason the house turned up on our list of the best rooftops in San Miguel. Olivia’s Bar sits above all that colonial stone and is exactly as good as that sounds, and the owner filled it with what she had collected across India, Thailand and the places in between: large carved wooden arches that came over in a shipping container, low furniture, textiles, lamps, objects with no relationship to each other except her eye for them. On paper it should not work over a patio with a biblical fresco running around it. It works, and it makes the clearest argument the house has ever made for itself. This was never a period room. Every owner added.
That accumulation is also the business, which is the part that is hard to sell. There is no group behind it and no brand standard. What guests get, including the ones whose names would mean something to you, is an owner who oversees every part of it herself, and a small staff who have been with her for years. That is why the people who come here keep coming back, and it is the reason the ones who could stay anywhere choose this. It is also the product, and the product cannot be franchised. After nine years of holding that standard up personally, she is ready to put it down.
“I would love people who are sensible,” the current owner says, “that really want to live around this beauty.” She spent a year deciding whether she could let the house go at all, and that is the sentence she landed on. Not a price, not a buyer profile. A hope about how somebody else will live here.
The brokerage handling the sale did something unusual with it. Instead of shooting a listing, they commissioned an artist. Six cyanotypes by the photographer Elisa Ybarra, each one starting with the shadow of a plant growing in the patio, the only thing here that has never left, then taking a second exposure of Turbeville’s world onto the same sheet: a camera, a window frame, a small sculpture. Two moments on one surface. Not a picture of the past so much as a way of looking through it. It is a strange way to move a building, and it is the most accurate thing anyone has said about this one in years.
The house is available through Wesley Gleason and Tomas Beamonte at Engel & Völkers San Miguel. It can carry on as a hotel or go back to being a private residence, and either would be fine. What matters is whether whoever signs understands what is in the deed: a Pocasangre cycle nobody has studied, a colonial tunnel under the floor, a photographer’s archive still sitting in the rooms she left it in, and a restoration that took the long route through the permits instead of around them.
You can protect a fresco. You can designate a building, catalogue the objects, lend the equipment to a school. You cannot legislate a sensibility, and the whole apparatus rests in the end on the private conscience of whoever holds the keys. So, to whoever signs: the fresco deserves a real study and you will be the one in a position to commission it, the tunnel should stay lit, and the comodato with Instituto Allende costs you nothing to honour. Three years of restoration can be undone in a fortnight by anyone in a hurry.
Because that is the pattern here, and it has held for three hundred years. A bishop’s tunnel. A painter’s Old Testament. A photographer’s twenty years. A hotelier’s decade. You inherit all of it, and the last line is still open.
Casa No Name in The Guide:
A curated monthly dose of lifestyle, culture, and rhythm from San Miguel.
