Manera Magazine, one of Spain’s reference design publications, walked through the pastry shop with a very specific question: what happens when interior design is built around a fruit?
The August 2024 feature by Mónica Barreneche traces the way Crearq (María Adelaida Herrera and Miguel León) designed the space around a metaphor: the contrast between the rigid, colorful skin of a tropical fruit and its pale, fibrous interior.
“Depending on the angle you look at it from, the pastry shop changes completely in textures and forms.”
— Crearq, via Manera Magazine
The piece walks through what most guests only feel intuitively: the travertine at the entrance, the terracotta and cream checkerboard tiles that follow, the magentas and purples that reference pomegranate, the ceiling lamps shaped like figs, the large-scale tapestry by Ángela Ramos woven to echo the fibers inside a fruit.
Under all of it, the original cartagenean house that had been hidden for decades: double-height ceilings with interlocking clay tiles, stone and brick arches, hydraulic floor tiles. Manera does not just document the design. It documents an act of listening to the building.
Come sit inside it. The details make more sense in person.
maneramagazine.es/interiorismo/nia-bakery-pasteleria-cartagena-de-indias/
