Sara & Julieta

Overview

A new boutique hotel opens in Mexico City’s Roma Norte November 1, 2026 inside two houses that have stood on Calle Tonalá for more than a century. Sara & Julieta restores the pair, built between 1903 and 1911, into a single home of 22 rooms and suites, keeping their early 20th-century character and giving it a contemporary touch. Out front are the plazas, century-old trees and cafés that have always drawn artists and writers to La Roma. Inside, it's a carefully kept hotel that finds a way to stay open to everything happening around it without losing its sense of intimacy.

The name belongs to two women from La Roma's past. Sara Pérez de Madero, wife of President Francisco I. Madero and known as the First Lady of the Revolution, lived on what was then Plaza Orizaba. Julieta Bastard ran a guesthouse here in the 1950s and 1960s, known for its patience with tenants behind on rent, among them painters, critics and journalists. The hotel casts them as its two hostesses and shapes the stay around them: Looking In, Sara's side, for privacy and rest, and Looking Out, Julieta's side, for the neighborhood all around.

The design is a mix of both eras. Original Porfirian moldings and French-inspired details stay in place, and the interiors around them filter the elegance of the period through a contemporary Mexican sensibility. An inner courtyard and a library give guests quiet places to settle in between time out in the neighborhood.

Clients could eat and drink well here for days without leaving the building. Pérez, the hotel's main dining room on the ground floor, comes from one of the chefs shaping Mexico City's food scene, serving fine dining with Mexican roots in a room open to the neighborhood as well as to guests. Bastard, a speakeasy set behind a discreet entrance, is intimate, social and a little rebellious, a nod to the bohemians Julieta once housed. Up on the rooftop, Omakase is a more personal, handcrafted experience built around taste, texture and aroma, fusing Japanese technique with Mexican influence.

Sara’s side of the stay, Looking In, is about being well looked after. The service is set up to learn how each guest likes things and to anticipate it quietly, and that attention extends to small pets, who are welcome to come along. For downtime, the spa has two treatment rooms and a thermal route for hot-and-cold circuits between sauna and cold plunge, and the gym is equipped by Technogym.

Julieta’s side, Looking Out, is about getting into the neighborhood. The hotel’s own themed routes lead through La Roma and beyond: surrealism, following Leonora Carrington, who lived and worked for more than 60 years in a house four blocks away; the Beat writers, who visited William S. Burroughs while he lived in La Roma and wrote Junky; the Porfirian architecture of the hotel’s own era; three Cervantes Prize winners who lived on these streets; and galleries from OMR to Kurimanzutto. The concierge team fills in the rest, from the café that isn’t in the guidebooks to the gallery that opened this week.

Between the two, it suits clients who want Mexico City at street level: a morning on one of the routes, a long lunch, a drink somewhere hidden, then a quiet room in a house where the staff already know their habits.