The artist’s fabled Casa Azul finally gets a crimson-hued counterpart this September, promising family letters, never-seen paintings, and a fresh take on Mexico’s most mythologized icon.
Frida Kahlo is about to have a second address in Coyoacán. Opening September 27, 2025, Museo Casa Kahlo, locals are already calling it Casa Roja, invites visitors beyond the well-trodden Casa Azul and into the more private rooms of the artist’s life.
The building itself is a homecoming: a 1900s residence once bought by Kahlo’s parents and later gifted to her beloved sister, Cristina. Just a short stroll from the blue house, the crimson façade sets up an immediate dialogue between past and present Mexico City, and between two versions of Frida we thought we already knew.
New York’s Rockwell Group has led the conversion, stripping the interiors back to timber and tile before layering in airy galleries and shaded courtyards that nod to Mexican modernism rather than copy it.
Inside, expect 800-plus personal objects: the first oil study she ever signed, a cache of childhood photographs, hand-inked letters to family, and the only mural she is confirmed to have painted. These are displayed alongside rotating shows by contemporary Mexican and Latin-American artists, many of them women, keeping the conversation alive rather than sealing it in glass.
The project is stewarded by Kahlo’s great-grand-niece Frida Hentschel Romeo and her mother, Mara Romeo, who have worked with historians to foreground the artist’s relationships—sisters, nieces, doctors, confidantes—over the familiar, larger-than-life myth. “We want visitors to meet the woman who laughed at family dinners before she became an icon on tote bags,” Hentschel has said.
Casa Roja also serves as a necessary foil to Casa Azul’s time-capsule allure. While the blue house preserves the Kahlo–Rivera legend, the red house threads a quieter narrative: Frida sketching by the courtyard nopal, dye-stained aprons drying in the sun, a budding painter piecing together her own identity long before the world joined in.
Tickets will be timed (best start refreshing that browser), and the museum plans late-night hours during Art Week in November, sliding straight into Mexico City’s contemporary-art calendar rather than living only in the past. Consider your Frida itinerary officially upgraded.
