Jeremy and I take an annual research trip. I like my trips full.

I'm a researcher and a planner. Before we arrive, I've usually spent months collecting recommendations, reading articles, saving restaurants and mapping galleries, hotels and houses. I'm big on a schedule. I'm probably a free spirit's worst travel companion.

I definitely have a fear of missing something. And I am happiest when a trip asks something of me. I know it's impossible to see everything, but that doesn't necessarily stop me trying. So our annual trips have developed a fairly familiar pace. Perpetual motion.

Breakfast is the exception. We intentionally linger, order another tea and pretend briefly that this is how we normally start our days. Maybe it's because life at home with four sons and a business is a wild pace. Travelling gives us something we rarely find in everyday life. Uninterrupted time together with nowhere to be (except the next place on my list!) and the most stressful part of the day is working out where we're going to eat next.

I'm not an architect or an interior designer. Obviously, living and working alongside Jeremy and growing our Practice has shaped what I notice, but somewhere along the way, the interest became completely my own.

In fact, when we travel, I'm often more passionate about it than he is. I'm the one who has found the house on the other side of the city, worked out when it opens and decided we can definitely squeeze it in.

I don't necessarily look at these places in the same way he does, and I don't always have the language to explain why something affects me. I just know when it does. And then I want to understand why.

I'd been dreaming about Mexico City for years. Jeremy wasn't convinced. He thought it would be too chaotic, too dangerous. I kept insisting. I thought I had a fairly good idea of what we were going to find. I didn't.

For starters, the city's greenery surprised me. We walked for hours through tree-lined boulevards, lush parks and hidden courtyards. It softened what I had imagined would be a dense urban landscape. In parts, it felt like the greenery was slowly taking over the city. There were dog walkers everywhere. Each leading extraordinary packs of hounds through the parks. One morning, we counted ten with a single walker. All calmly padding along, as though they'd rehearsed it.

And we did walk, a lot. Through Condesa, Roma Norte, and Coyoacán. I became slightly obsessed with the facades of the houses, the doorways, the pavements, the changes in material underfoot. My camera roll is full of them. I loved that you could look at a front door and almost start imagining the people and the life behind it.

At Casa Gilardi, the stories were almost as good as the house. Eduardo took us through his home. He was the son of the client that had convinced Barragán to come out of retirement to design a space that seemed to be as much about having friends over and throwing parties as it was about living. There were photographs of those celebrations on the bookshelves, including a very young David Hockney. In the kitchen, Eduardo's mother was chopping vegetables for dinner as we walked past.

Downstairs around that spectacular indoor pool, I was trying to imagine the parties, but also wondering how a room full of people managed all those wet tiles with seemingly no drainage.

We kept noticing things like that. Edges with no balustrades, drops that would never get past an Australian council. We were told Barragán believed that your home was your own world, and within it, you should be able to decide how you want to live.

Barragán's own house was the standout. Nothing quite prepares you for the shift from seeing a place in photographs to standing quietly within it. It was difficult to place in time. It was built decades ago, but it didn't feel old. Nor did it feel like it was trying to be contemporary. Everything about it seemed to slow me down. I found myself looking longer, noticing more, reluctant to leave each room for the next. The guide had to keep reminding me there was a group waiting.

And then Anahuacalli was almost the complete opposite. Dark, volcanic, heavy. Fortress-like and forbidding from the outside. Once inside, everything softened. Light filtered in through the onyx windows. The volcanic stone almost seemed to glow. It felt calm, almost church like. Sacred. I loved it equally. Jeremy, not so much. It made me realise that the feeling I was responding to wasn't one particular kind of architecture at all.

Lago Algo was a surprise. A 1960's Mexican modernist building buried deep in Chapultepec, one of the world's largest urban parks, it's now part cultural centre, part restaurant. I loved its rawness; the concrete, the unfinished quality, the monumental sweeping, saddle-shaped ceiling, (hyperbolic paraboloid, if we're being architecturally correct!) Then these huge floor to ceiling glass walls looking straight out over the lake. You're standing inside this vast concrete pavilion while, seemingly metres away, tourists are trying to navigate pedal boats around the water. The contrast was brilliant. The scale of the place was incredible.

And for all my planning, one of the places I loved most wasn't on any of my lists. We ended up at Safe Space because of a free meditation class. We hadn't gone there to see the building at all, but suddenly found ourselves inside Proyectos Públicos, this extraordinary heritage adaptive reuse project that we might otherwise never have discovered. The whole place felt slightly surreal; part relic, a collection of old buildings and remnants of another time, with cascading vines, crumbling walls and layers of history all left beautifully exposed.

I’ve conceded. Sometimes there are some advantages to going off schedule.