San Miguel de Allende Shopping: Folkart, Furniture, Herbal Remedies & more

Shopping in Zócalo is like having a seasoned collector guide you through their home. The store, which has a sister outpost in Pátzcuaro, is operated by Rick and Deb Hall, who for decades have been cultivating relationships with regional artisans whose works they display. Think of them like the chef who personally selects the sources for his fruits, vegetables and cheeses. They stock their stores with a wide range of colorful, decorative folk art—clay figures and housewares, ceramics, papier mâché, traditional “trees of life,” toys—and can tell you the story behind the creation of each item.

If you're looking to add some color to your home, this is not the place for you. Walk into La Antigua and you'll feel like you're peering in on the set of an old old Frank Capra movie—the crisp linens and housewares are a study in black and white and gray. There are white handmade tablecloths, napkins, guayaberas, and other textiles. Everything here is infused with traditional Mexican spirit and yet is very un-Mexican in that it's devoid of color, but nontheless has purity of style.

This nouveau apothecary is an inviting sanctuary stocked with of natural remedies and aromatic tinctures, oils, floral essences, lotions and items for beauty treatments and good health. The husband and wife owners—he an ethnobotanist and agronomist, she a midwife and herbalist—work with plants they grow in their own gardens or buy from specialty growers throughout Mexico. From natural first aid to aromatherapy products to bath salts and hair care, they have something straight from nature that's good for whatever ails you in their colonial style store and they'll tell you about it with the same kind of homegrown TLC they put into making each item. Fittingly, they also sell crafts, cards and jewelry and offer classes on herbal remedies.

In the city's downtown, this shop and gallery occupies a 350-year-old manor and is crammed with furniture and decorative objects. The store is best known for its hand-carved wooden archangels and carved wood furniture, both of which they will custom design. The artisans here are expert at working with gold-leaf glass to add an edge of glitz to household fixtures, like sinks. While you're here browsing, visit the upstairs gallery, where paintings by noted Mexican artists are on heavy rotation.