We visited a lot of house museums in Mérida. Spend just a couple days walking up and down the Paseo de Montejo, and you'll notice a pattern—heavy iron gates, grand façades, and—if the curtains are open—another lovingly preserved salon waiting for visitors who care about late 19th-century upholstery.
These elaborate houses on Mérida’s grand Paseo don’t appeal to rich people today, who prefer to be admired from a distance—ideally via drone footage—and they’ve run out of banks willing to turn them into showcase offices. Honestly, a lot of these houses blend together, an endless parade of Murano glass chandeliers and velvet rope barriers.
Montejo 495 does not.
It’s one of the Casas Gemelas—the twin houses on Paseo de Montejo built by brothers Ernesto and Camilo Cámara Zavala in the early 1900s. The northern house is still private, but this one’s been opened to the public as a museum. You can visit. You should.
The Cámara brothers made their fortune in henequén and decided to spend a good chunk of it on matching homes in the city’s newest, most self-important neighborhood—where mansions were built to impress Paris, not Mérida. They hired French architect Gustave Umbdenstock, whose work they’d seen at the St. Louis World’s Fair. He designed the plans, chose the finishes, and sent everything down to Mexico, where construction began in 1908 under the direction of local engineer Manuel Cantón Ramos (who, not for nothing, was also building his uncle’s new place, the Palacio Cantón, just a block up the street).
The house was complete by 1911—just in time for the Mexican Revolution. Which, in hindsight, might’ve been a bad time to install marble. The house opened just as Mexico’s old guard was about to get unseated. That it’s still standing—with its imported finishes and Versailles envy intact—is either a miracle or a metaphor.
The layout inside centers on a three-story space with a grand staircase—the ceremonial kind that is dramatic and impractical, clearly designed for gowns with trains and guests with nowhere to be anytime soon—and an enormous stained-glass skylight. Most of the finish work came from France. The rest was done locally and done well. The marble, ironwork, cabinetry, and ornamental details remain intact. Somehow, so is the mood. It’s the kind of symmetry that's deeply satisfying until you realize you've walked in a circle trying to find the bathroom. It's formal but not cold and just eccentric enough to feel personal.
In the 1960s, the house passed to the Barbachano family—descendants of the Don Ernesto, early tourism developers, and owners of the Mayaland Hotel near Chichén Itzá. They restored it, added complementary furnishings, and hosted an odd but impressive mix of visitors—including Jackie Kennedy, Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly, and Umberto II of Italy.
The house opened to the public in 2021. You can tour the first floor, with its drawing rooms, library, dining room, and game room, and then head upstairs to see how the Barbachano family lived. That level has more personality—closets built for custom dresses, pink-tiled vestibules, and a screening room installed decades ago but still looking surprisingly current. Heck, the wardrobe in one of the daughter’s rooms was bigger than my first apartment.
There's art on the walls, collected mainly by the family. You don’t need to know the artists to enjoy the collection—it’s well-chosen without being showy. It’s not overwhelming—just enough to remind you that real people with good taste lived here.
Like most buildings down here, the structure has taken some hits from the climate and the weather. Paint peels. Details fade. Windows get blown out by hurricanes. But the house is in remarkable condition, especially considering it’s only ever belonged to two families. Best of all, there’s been no attempt to over-curate or stage it into something it never was. That restraint is part of what makes the visit worthwhile.
In a city where every second mansion is now a museum with a docent and a guestbook, Montejo 495 stands out. It doesn’t feel like part of a parade. And for once, you don't need to imagine what it must have been like. You can walk through the rooms. You can open a closet. You can stand at the bottom of the staircase and decide if you'd like to go left or right. You can’t go wrong.
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