While a friend and I were combing design shops in New York City last spring, we found ourselves at The Future Perfect. There, in Brooklyn, my friend spied a neon ceramic ladybug sculpture. At the checkout counter, the clerk told us about the ladybug’s provenance: It was made by a Mexico City-based duo who lived, he mentioned, in an apartment unlike anything he’d ever seen. Eventually, that comment led us all the way to Mexico.

In a corner apartment in Mexico City’s La Condesa neighborhood, at the top of a 1952 apartment building, Tony Moxham and Mauricio Paniagua make their home. But the 3,229-square-foot space isn’t just a place to live: They also use it as an office, an event space, a showroom, and a lab of sorts for the design principles that inform their company, DFC.

Moxham and Paniagua have lived in the space for five years, as long as they’ve been in Mexico City. They came to the country circuitously: Moxham, who is Australian, and Paniagua, who hails from Guatemala, met in a New York City dive bar in 2004. Six months later, they bought a house together in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Moxham was working for Interview magazine and Paniagua as an industrial designer, and both were feeling ground down by the pace of life in New York. Luckily, the speedy gentrification of Williamsburg allowed them to flip the house for a profit and embark on eight months of travel throughout Mexico.

In a country with strong craft traditions, the pair decided that they’d glimpsed, in Moxham’s words, “work we were interested in doing ourselves.” They settled in Mexico and started DFC, a design company whose ethos Moxham calls “a combination of modern design, world history, and the work of traditional Mexican artisans.”

Visitors to the apartment in La Condesa would be well advised to leave their preconceived notions of what a home looks like at the door. As photographer Stephen Karlisch put it, “I never met anybody who lives like they do.”

Life, redesigned from the ground up? Moxham doesn’t deny it.

In its strangeness, the home embodies the same values that inform DFC. As Moxham explains, the company is about “magic, beauty, fun, fantasy, and excess, of course, with an emphasis on Mexican references and talents.” These references are apparent all over the apartment, both in what is present (a 7-foot-tall black stallion in the living room) and what is absent (nary a sofa or conventional chair can be seen). The overall effect is one of a slightly sinister fun house: The frilly overabundance of Mexican folk art meets the pneumatic, machine-tooled exorbitance of Jeff Koons. And radical simplicity (“They just don’t have furniture,” says Karlisch) meets intensely thought-out, even decadent, decor.

The terrace boasts great views of Chapultepec Park and the castle—and they’re just about the only views to be had from anywhere in the apartment. Inside, Moxham and Paniagua have waged war against their own windows. Library windows are plastered over with the same Mexican oilcloth that also papers the walls, ceiling, and floor. In Moxham’s study, the windows are fitted with light-blocking decals of favorite quotes. The windows in the bedroom have been obscured by oilcloth-covered sheet rock, which combined with the dark wood paneling that runs from floor to ceiling around the entire room, gives it “the feeling of a sex club or a bizarre private bar,” Moxham says.

And that’s not the end of the Alice-in-Wonderland touches. The floor of the bedroom is completely taken up by two king-size futons; the TV is stashed in a closet in the library. Paniagua’s study is nearly filled with altars representing different religions. In Moxham’s office, a chaise lounge sits “to help convey a Freud-ish, therapist feeling more than to provide a sitting area.”

Add it all up and it starts to seem as though the couple have expatriated themselves from the dictates of domestic life itself.

But while their way of decorating is certainly over-the-top, it’s also strangely utilitarian.

“We are definitely guided by our own desires when it comes to relaxing and creating spaces,” says Moxham. “Conventional ideas about decorating often don’t work for us. We’re both big believers in doing whatever feels natural.” Case in point is the living room, which instead of perpendicular sofas contains a single long wooden table with benches and a decorated tree trunk. It’s not just a design statement: The long table makes it “easier for our friends to gather and talk rather than splinter into smaller and less-social groups,” as in a traditional living room setup.

Determined to entertain friends as much as possible, the couple fine-tuned the apartment for that purpose. “Currently, our home is decorated more in a way one might outfit a club or bar than an actual living space, which is something we wanted to explore as an idea,” says Moxham. The club idea is why some of the rooms are painted matte black, “while others are so excessively accessorized that they feel like crazy VIP lounges.”

In addition to creating goods for DFC, the designers have begun to take on interior-design clients. And, says Moxham, they redecorate their own apartment frequently—about twice a year. Their next project?  “We’re thinking our next big change may be to paint the entire place in Chinese restaurant red.”

I should have known he had more than a few new throw pillows in mind.