How Maye Ruiz Found Her Creative Life in San Miguel de Allende
She's speaking from San Miguel de Allende, a colonial town in the geographic center of Mexico that she never planned to live in. "Life is crazy," says Maye Ruiz. "I moved here before COVID because my husband lived here." About five years prior, she was in Mexico City, where she spent nearly a decade working, designing, and teaching at some of the most prestigious universities.
San Miguel de Allende is a small town that shouldn't work for a designer of Maye Ruiz's ambitions, and yet, it does in that really quirky way that unexpected places suddenly become exactly the right container for the ideal creative life. The town is international without forcing itself to be. American and Canadian expats have been arriving for decades, buying houses, gutting them, and starting over from scratch. Nearby is Dolores Hidalgo, a town where Ruiz explains, "everybody works with ceramics." Even her husband uses ancestral wicker techniques to make lampshades and flamingos in the same antique techniques that find their roots in Mexican culture.
This is the world Maye Ruiz calls home, and where everything becomes full circle.
Why Color Is Personal, Not Just a Matter of Taste
Before she was the designer behind Casakoa, one of her most visible projects, commissioned by clients from Melbourne, Australia, who bought a house in San Miguel and asked her to make it theirs, she was a kid in Leon, Guanajuato, who couldn't stop rearranging furniture and drawing constantly. Ruiz was passionate about the arts and studied Interior Design at Universidad De La Salle. She did try business first, briefly, but it only served as a reality check. "That became a very clear sign," she says about that period, "that I needed to pursue something creative; that was always such a defining part of who I am."
She spent years working as a designer, an interior project manager, a teacher, a children's fashion stylist, an art director for ad campaigns, and even a landscape designer. It wasn't until 2021 that she founded Maye Estudio, and each previous experience came together in a beautiful, confidently formed mosaic of a saturated and deliberate point of view: Color is necessary and should be used without apology.
"Mexico is not beige," exclaims Ruiz, leaving no room for debate in her claim. "I mean, if you're from another country and someone mentions to you, 'Oh, Mexico, you think about color. The food is colorful. The clothing is colorful. The art, all of it. The rest of the world hears Mexico and thinks about color."
The irony she brings up, however, is that some of the more wealthy of the country spent a decade not thinking about color. Instead, they got drunk on the Japandi influence and packaged the "Tulum aesthetic" for global consumption. It's easy to see why because of its simplicity, but "all of these spaces are the same. Every space could be like a spa, or it could be a restaurant, or it could be a home. It's all the same space," laments Ruiz. That all-neutral, all-organic visual language that could be anything, anywhere on earth, tends to defeat the purpose of designing any of the above.
Maye Ruiz doesn't relate to it. Never has. She traces her conviction back to university where she started discovering fabric brands like the Designers Guild in the UK that offered palettes she had no vocabulary for yet. "I remember seeing all of these color palettes and thinking: why would people choose gray? Why would people choose these boring colors when you have all these options? A lot of people said I'd get bored or that it's overwhelming. But I think," she pauses, "it is changing right now."
And Ruiz would be right about that.
How Maye Ruiz Helps Clients Discover Their Color
Red is Ruiz's signature. "A lot of people relate me with red," she says. "And I found that red gives me life." Carefully, though, she doesn't make a prescription for everyone to follow. Her philosophy is that every person has a color that belongs to their history, their generation, the context of what moves them; according to Ruiz, it's her job to find it for her clients.
Where most design content talks about color as a reference to taste, something you either have or don't as a matter of preference, Ruiz talks about it more like ancestral excavation; something you uncover about yourself rather than something you choose. "Color is about the full mix," she expresses. "And this is what most people don't understand when it comes to design. Here in Mexico, people think that orange walls are for fast food. But what orange? You have a million of oranges. And what is the big picture? What is the total mix of colors you want to express in this space? You can't just generalize with colors."
She has blues in her current space, blues that contrast with orange and create tension and balance at the same time (I'm a bit biased to this color mix here as a die hard Knicks fan and believe everyone should adopt it in some shape or form in their life).
"I don't have any formulas. I don't think, okay, I already used this color palette so for this other project, I should reinvent myself. I try to look for the right color palette for this client, for this project, for this context."
She pauses as she adds something a touch more personal.
"Honestly, color really helped me a lot with my own mood too. Because sometimes, my energy is not the best, you know? And color helps."
Designing for the Spirit of a Space Instead of Trends
Have you ever been in a space and felt that it had no soul? Was it void of expression or any sign of natural human life?
Maye Ruiz has and calls the concept she carries into her projects, genius loci. It's an ancient Roman idea of a space having a protective spirit or guardian force that gives a location its particular character, atmosphere, and history. When you enter a building and something feels wrong, or when a renovated house has lost whatever made it feel like a home, the genius loci has been largely ignored.
"The idea is to try to communicate with this spirit," says Ruiz. "Try to get what it wants for the space instead of just coming there and transforming everything because of your taste or whatever is trending."
This approach is unconventional in an era that encourages you to perform as the unquestionable expert because it asks you to slow down, listen, observe, and resist the urge to impose your assumptions before you act; a mindset that supports another metaphor she returned to several times in our conversation, resisting the allure of the surface of the iceberg.
Unlike most designers who just see the aesthetic and reproduce it and then move on, Ruiz needs to go deep; she prefers the secrets that lie underneath the surface. And her most recent collaboration makes that point better than any theory could.
How History and Culture Shaped Her Milan Design Week Installation
Last month, Maye Ruiz stood in a room at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan and presented the installation she'd created for IKEA's Food for Thought at Milan Design Week. The room was called Party at Your Place, and her culinary collaborator was Rosio Sanchez: a Chicago-born, Guanajuato-heritage chef who became head pastry chef at the iconic Noma in Copenhagen under Rene Redzepi, then left to open Hija de Sanchez, a taqueria that is lauded for bringing authentic masa, tacos, and authentic Mexican techniques to Europe.
Instead of settling for surface interpretations for their joint presentation, both women explored deeper into Mexican history to find where their creativity, present, and future ambitions all connected. "We went to a convent," Ruiz explains, "because a lot of Mexican cuisine was created by nuns in convents during the 16th century." During the Mexican Baroque period, the syncretism of Spanish and indigenous cultures produced some of the most iconic Mexican dishes, in large part, in convent kitchens where women who wanted to cook had few other options. You had Mole, Chiles en nogada, and a myriad of other dishes all made by these nuns.
The room Ruiz and Rosio built honors them with: celestial blue walls, ceramics, niches, low enveloping seating arranged for food to be shared across sofas and at floor level, and integrated surfaces that replace the traditional silhouette of a dining table. "We wanted to honor these women, and at the same time, play on the concept of a girls' dinner," Ruiz quips.
How Craft and Culture Travel Across Generations
The ceramics that appear throughout her work, and now through her San Miguel life, are evidence of her respect for the genealogy of craft and creativity. She mentions the generations of ceramicist in Dolores Hidalgo, and manages to relate them to experience she had in Marrakech last year, citing the differences in culture and history, yet the similar expressions through craft. The ceramics in Marrakech came from Spain, Spain got them from the Middle East, the Middle East got them from China, and a craft that migrated and became something else in each new place managed to be celebrated without losing its DNA. "We are all migrants in some way shape, or form," she says. "We are a mix of a lot of cultures and journeys of generations of people moving and exploring the world."
In the world of Maye Ruiz, novelty takes a back seat to continuity. Even when the conversation turns to lighting.
Light Is the First Thing You Experience in a Room
When we turned the conversation to lighting, Ruiz frames it the way a colorist would: "Light is super important because it's the very first thing your eyes can see when you get into a room. But at the same time, you want to see the light, not the bulb, and you never want it cold."
She never uses cool light, not once, not in any project.
"I hate it," laughs Ruiz.
Practically, it makes sense. When you're working with deep colors on walls, the room naturally is darker. The fixtures then do the work to add structure and ensure the color the room is blessed with is balanced out beautifully.
"My favorite thing is to look for statement lamps that really help you to decorate. Like real sculptural lamps. Not like just a lamp and its bulb, real light fixtures.
Why the Most Meaningful Spaces Are Built by Listening
We ended our conversation with a simple question: what room, outside of her own work has moved her recently?
Without hesitation, she mentions the Riyadh she stayed in and the Yves Saint Laurent home in Marrakech. "I felt like: oh my gosh! I want to start again to design. I want to forget everything I've learned and learn it all again here." She's also quick to mention Bill Willis, the Memphis Born designer who arrived in Marrakech in 1966 and revived Moroccan craftsmanship when it was on the verge of extinction. The once dubbed "Magician from Memphis" spent decades working with Yves Saint Laurent on the very villa that Ruiz now calls one of the most inspiring spaces she's ever been to.
"I wanted to buy his book," says Ruiz. "But my husband said it was too heavy to carry home."
She laughs without reservation.
She found Willis with what seems to be the same way she comes across most things: in the rooms themselves, in the arches, niches, the hidden corners and intentional spaces that keep everything we deem important; the spirit of the place still there and waiting for someone to come along and listen.
Maye Ruiz is an artist, interior designer, and the founder of Maye Estudio, based in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Follow her work and more at @Mayeruz. All Images courtesy of Maye Estudio.