Lujo Lifestyle
Floydilou Kerr and Tracy Bonin met on Lazero Cardenas one hot August day. Being the slow season, there was nobody on the streets. Floydilou describes, “Tracy saw me wandering. I was walking around looking for a place to open an art studio and gallery, but I actually did look like I was lost. Tracy said, ‘Can I help you?’ I explained what I was looking for, and she said, ‘Well, I’m an artist!’ ”
Floydilou found her space, near Lazero Cardenas and Galeana, and opened her “Bucerias Art Gallery,” the gallery downstairs, and her painting studio upstairs. She wanted Bucerias to be known as the place to “shop, play, dine, stay.” Tracy was the first artist to hang her paintings in the Bucerias Art Gallery. Eventually the building was changed into apartments and it was time for Floydilou to move on.
“I’m kind of known as “The Floral Artist,” or, “The Funky Face Artist.”
In her current studio, Floydilou holds painting workshops. She wants her students to “Unleash their inner artist that’s been buried all those years while having careers and taking care of family. I like helping people with their, ‘courage at the canvass,’ either absolute beginners or really tight proffessional artists who want to loosen up.”
Meanwhile…
Tracy moved here from Red Deer, Alberta. She had vacationed here once, after a friend recommended Bucerias as a safe place for single females. The next year, “the stars all aligned,” and she decided to move here permanently. “I wanted to live my dream of living somewhere in the tropics. I sold my house and everything in it.” Tracy describes her first year here, and meeting Floydilou, “I was basically recovering from my old life. Emergency services, and working for 911 was super-stressful. So many people helped me in getting my bearings.” Tracy wanted to pay-it-forward, so when she saw Floydilou wandering as if lost, she immediately stepped up to help. “It turns out Floydilou was just looking for space to rent, but we became fast friends.”
Tracy is no longer single. “I had to move all the way to Mexico to meet the love of my life!”
After almost a year of living here, Tracy went back to Alberta to visit family. While there, she visited her doctor who discovered Tracy had breast cancer. They told her they would have her fixed up and back in Bucerias within a year, but she felt she had already made Bucerias home, so she underwent treatment here, “with an amazing group of physicians.”
“It was a spur of the moment decision to team up and run the gallery.”
These days the two ladies run Lujo Lifestyle. In deciding the interior design of their space, they wanted to “take down the walls of that pretentious gallery feel and offer an open, functional, fancy and special place.” That they did. There’s not a lot of clutter, no feeling of being overwhelmed by a lot of products everywhere. “We like people to envision creating their own space when choosing pieces.”
The art gallery is aptly named. All items on display are positively luxurious, from the hand made soap, to jewelry, tableware, textiles, furniture, chocolate, and of course, their own acrylics on canvass, as both ladies are painters, and they showcase other artists work to offer a well rounded variety of creative pieces.
