Picture Mexico, or go just about anywhere in the country, and what you see is color, pattern, texture, and more color. Boldly striped serapes, painted pottery, corner food carts bursting with fresh fruits and vegetables, and the national green-white-red theme on everything from flags to clothing to souvenirs. Surely you envision something like this:

Vibrant dwellings like Frida Kahlo’s casa azul in Coyoacán, the pastel streetscapes in Roma Norte and La Condesa, and Rivera’s and Siqueiros’s multicolor murals have been around for decades. Going back even further, both indigenous and European-influenced art, from pre-Columbian to baroque to neoclassical to revolutionary to today’s street art and handicrafts, have long exhibited a fondness for bright hues and busy patterns. You expect paint jobs like this:

And walls of this sort:

Local architecture and design – Aztec, Mayan, on through the Spanish conquistadors and the post-colonial years, and well into the 21^st century – have featured intricately carved wood, the heavy textures of lava and cantera stone, and motifs that are geometric or ornate in nature. You marvel at these:

Mexico is most certainly not the place to go for sleek lines, minimalist style, or all-white interiors. For glossy black expanses and shiny metallic facades. Right?

Wrong. Mexico City, these days a must-see destination for world travelers in search of the next hip stop for food, culture, and nightlife, has modern curiosities hiding in many corners of the sprawling metropolis.

A few weeks ago, I spent my first day in CDMX hanging out in Santa Fe, the new-ish business center in the southwest quadrant of the city. It’s not a culturally rich place; in fact, it’s a bit sterile and boring, but it’s calming and peaceful in the Zen-like way that clean design and natural vegetation can be in the middle of an enormous, hectic city.

I floated from fountains to gardens, under wings of canvas and onto glossy cantilevered terraces, past living walls and koi ponds. I sat on a bench in a park of tiered grasses and dipped my hand in a pool edged with metal and stones. For twenty-four hours, I felt like I was on a retreat tucked away from the 21 million people in Mexico City’s overall metropolitan area.

As we ventured back into the urban core, we stopped at another modern surprise: the Museo Soumaya, a smooth and curvy, metal-scaled appendage pushing into the air in tony Polanco. Funded by Carlos Slim, one of the wealthiest men in the world, and named after his late wife, the museum holds the largest collection of Rodin sculptures outside of France, a record-setting assortment of ancient Mexican coins, and a staggering number of European and Mexican paintings. As is usually the case with me and museums, the bones of this one drew me as much as the contents. The palette was white, white, and white (walls, ceiling, and floors), and the six levels were joined by a Guggenheim-ish spiral staircase.

After a day and a half, we settled into the more familiar Mexico to eat tacos and roam the markets amid the usual splashes of color and liveliness in the capital. But make no mistake, the modern is alive and well in CDMX, and its presence is a pleasing counterpoint, a different little jewel in an already rewarding treasure chest.

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And just for fun … some local color of a different type: dog school in Parque Mexico in La Condesa, my favorite find of our mid-week Mexican mini-trip!