Where six (or ten) of you can stay in Mexico City

If there are six of you and you want one front door, book Lagrange, our three-bedroom apartment in Polanco. Three bedrooms, six beds, four bathrooms, and a lift, which matters more than it sounds when six people arrive with luggage at once. That's the straight answer. If your group is larger than six, or if you'd rather everyone had their own room and their own bathroom, the shape of the answer changes, and that's worth a few hundred words.

Six people, one apartment, four bathrooms

Four bathrooms for three bedrooms is an unusual ratio, and it's the detail I'd point at first. Groups of six usually fail on mornings: one shower, six people, somebody missing the Teotihuacán start. At Lagrange that problem doesn't exist. There's a dining table, a stocked kitchen (stove, oven, microwave, blender, wine glasses), a washer and dryer, and a dedicated workspace if someone in the party has a call they can't move.

Polanco sits northwest of Condesa, and in normal traffic you're looking at twenty to forty minutes between the two, depending on the hour. Chapultepec Park is the neighbourhood's backyard: the castle, the zoo, and the Museo Nacional de Antropología all sit inside it. If your group's idea of a holiday involves eating at Pujol or Quintonil, you're in the right postcode for it.

Worth knowing before you book: Lagrange has a stair gate and window guards, which is a small thing until you're travelling with a toddler, at which point it's the whole decision. It doesn't take pets.

When your group is bigger than six

Here's where I'd rather be useful than salesy. We don't operate an eight-bedroom villa in Mexico City. What we have instead, on Calle Atlixco in Condesa, is a house full of private bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, built around shared space: a kitchen with everything in it, a rooftop terrace with seating and a BBQ, a ground-floor patio, and an indoor coworking area. Eight or ten people can absolutely take over that house. They just do it as separate rooms rather than one booking, and the common rooms do the work a living room does in a villa.

For some groups that's a downgrade. For others, it's quietly better. Nobody draws the short straw and sleeps on a sofa bed. Nobody shares a bathroom with their colleague. Everyone has a smart lock on their own door and comes and goes without waking anybody. And the rooftop, with the grill going at dusk, does what a shared terrace is supposed to do.

Whether a set of rooms can be reserved together for your dates is a question for us rather than a checkout page. Message us with the dates and the headcount and we'll tell you what's open.

The Condesa rooms, and how they differ

Most of the rooms sleep two on a double bed, with an ensuite bathroom, 500 Mbps Wi-Fi, daily housekeeping, and free street parking out front. The differences are real, though, and they decide who goes where when a group splits up:

• Zeta is the largest room in the house. Give it to the couple staying longest, or to whoever brought the most luggage.
• Alpha has high ceilings, hardwood floors and large windows, with a desk and chair. It reads loft rather than guest room.
• Epsilon takes light from big windows and keeps a mini fridge, which is the difference between walking downstairs for a beer and not.
• Gamma has a sofa and a full-size bed, and its private bathroom sits about two metres from the bedroom door rather than inside the room. Entirely yours, just not ensuite. Say so to whoever you're assigning it to.
• Omega sits near the rooftop access. Convenient if you're the one running the grill, less so if you're a light sleeper.
• Beta and Kappa are both bright, recently renovated, ensuite. Solid rooms with no quirks to flag.
• Delta is the petit one, built on the theory that location beats square footage. For a group, it's the room the person who's barely going to be indoors should take.
• Sigma sleeps one. If your group has a seventh wheel or a solo traveller joining late, this is where they go.

Atlixco, and why the location does half the work

Calle Atlixco runs through Condesa, and the practical consequence is that a group staying here doesn't need to coordinate transport to dinner. Cafés, restaurants, bars and galleries are on foot, and Parque México is a short walk, which is where everybody ends up on the first morning without planning to. Roma Norte is fifteen or twenty minutes away on foot, close enough that the two neighbourhoods behave like one.

For longer trips, Uber and Didi do most of the lifting. The metro is walkable if you prefer it: Juanacatlán, Patriotismo and Chapultepec are all eleven to twenty minutes out. From the airport, plan on half an hour to an hour into Condesa or Polanco, depending on when you land. Mid-afternoon on a weekday is the slow one.

Teotihuacán is about an hour north on the toll roads, traffic permitting, and it's a genuinely good use of one day for a group with a car or a booked driver. Go early.

Which one to book

Six people who want to cook together, shut one door behind them and argue over the sound system: Lagrange, and the four bathrooms will be the thing you thank yourselves for. Six or more who'd rather each have a private room and private bathroom, and who want to be able to walk home from dinner: the Condesa rooms, taken as a block, with the rooftop as your shared living room.

Remote workers tip the decision toward Condesa. The 500 Mbps line, the indoor coworking area and a desk in several of the rooms mean two or three people can be on calls simultaneously without anybody sitting on a bed with a laptop. Long stays work in both: the apartment and the rooms all allow them, and there's laundry on site either way.

Booking it

Book direct. Lower prices, no middlemen, no platform fees. Check-in is self check-in with a smart lock, so a group landing at different hours doesn't need to coordinate a handover, and support is there 24/7 in English and Spanish if something goes sideways at midnight.

For anything involving more than one room on the same dates, write to us rather than booking piecemeal. Tell us the headcount, the dates and whether you need everyone under one roof, and we'll put the arrangement together. Questions: WhatsApp +52 55 6676 3867. Ask about code NONREFUNDABLE for 10% off a non-refundable stay.