ALTARA | Bringing the Temple Home
A conversation with Cat La Fey, creator of Altara Studio

Cat La Fey is a Romanian Creative Director & Holistic Designer based in Mexico City. She works at the intersection of design, spirituality, and hospitality. With over a decade of experience in the healing arts, shamanic studies, and eco-psychology, she explores how space and ritual shape human experience, reimagining altars and environments as immersive tools for transformation. In her latest work, Altara | Bringing the Temple Home, Cat deconstructs the idea of a traditional altar, rearranging its elements in entirely new and thoroughly enlightening ways.
She reimagines the altar as a dynamic piece of ritual functional art, designed to live in homes, hotels, and collective spaces of reflection.
Each altar is tailor-made, crafted from wood, copper, quartz, and water, forming a living circuit that responds to human presence, a reminder that energy flows where attention goes. Cat’s approach is both philosophical and playful, inviting her audience to engage with her works actively and introspectively. Altara blurs the line between object and experience, opening a space where people can practice imagination. The altar pieces come with the Altara Meditation Deck, the first of its kind: forty-four oracle-style cards, each opening a portal into a guided meditation and transformative practice. At the core of Cat’s artistic expression is the conviction that art serves as a potent form of therapy. This belief shapes her every creation, seeking to awaken new perspectives and dormant sensations in those who experience it.

You speak of Altara as if it were alive. Where did it begin?
It might sound unusual, but I’ve always felt that ideas are living structures and thatthey find us when the time is ripe. Altara came to me like that. I felt it almost as a living presence. The idea began sprouting in my mind and I knew I had a responsibility to birth it. First came the altar piece, and then the cards and meditations as a bridge, a complete system. There is a part of me that believes Altara is alive. I notice it most in the impact it has on the collective. James Baldwin wrote a sentence I live by: “Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.” This captures what I believe to be our greatest responsibility as creators: to dream consciously. To me, imagination is a form of architecture, the sacred blueprint through which the invisible becomes visible. If we dream with awareness, beauty becomes structure. If we dream unconsciously, chaos does. Altara grew out of this lineage and its purpose is to remind us that imagination is participation.

You studied journalism and media before turning toward design, meditation, and art. How did that transition unfold?
In journalism, I learned to craft stories, and in media, to choreograph light, sound, and timing. What I didn’t realize then was that these same principles apply to the psyche. Producing a meditation, to me, is like producing an inner film. You compose the soundscape, build emotional tension, and guide the release. A film projects light onto a wall. A meditation projects light into the mind. Both aim to stir emotion, ignite imagination, and expand perception. Each meditation is an archetypal scene, an encounter between the self and one of its many mirrors. Each journey awakens imagination and depth of feeling, intentionally cultivating emotion and state. In a world saturated with external imagery, I wanted to create a cinema that unfolds inward, where the subconscious is safe to express while witnessed and guided.

What is Altara, physically?
I like to look at it as an ecosystem. In simple terms, it has three elements: A handcrafted altar that creates a sacred space, a deck of forty-four oracle cards that come with a leather-bound book carrying their stories and meanings and a pair of headphones for the meditations. Each card is linked to a 15 - 20 minute sound journey: voice, music, and frequencies. Together, they create a simple ritual: you sit, you pull a card, you listen. And somehow, you always receive the exact practice you need. This has been my personal ritual for years. Every morning, I would prepare my space, light a candle, burn incense, draw a card, and meditate. The messages always arrived by resonance. But I never found a system that united the symbolic language of oracles and the depth of a guided meditation. So I created one. The space where we meditate also has its own relevance. An altar is an intentional space, a gateway to the divine. When we sit before it, we step outside of ordinary time into a living portal where anything is possible and all potentials are alive. The altar becomes a mirror of the inner world, a small universe that holds our symbols, stories, and prayers. It’s an invitation to slow down, reconnect, and remember that imagination is a form of prayer. Whether in a home, hotel, or collective space, my wish was that Altara turns any corner into a sanctuary.

What has been the impact of Altara so far? How do people respond?
At Design Week, I presented Altara as an audio gallery. Many came expecting only an art installation, but when the sound journeys began, something shifted. Some cried, others sat in silence long after their session ended. Some returned the next day, bringing friends. I think people are starving for connection and beauty that includes them, for art they can experience. The journeys offer that: a space to feel, to reconnect. It’s powerful to watch. When people meditate together, something sacred reawakens.

You often speak about the design of meditation spaces. What defines a true meditation room in your view?
A meditation space should speak to the senses the way a film speaks to the emotions: through light, texture, scent, and temperature. I design according to both esoteric and holistic principles: the geometry of direction, the conductivity between materials, the dialogue of elements. The intention of a meditation room is not merely aesthetic. Nothing is decorative; each object is symbolic, a vessel for energy. Mircea Eliade, one of my favorite Romanian philosophers, wrote that sacred space is where the divine breaks through the ordinary, a hierophany, a moment when the invisible becomes visible. That’s what a true meditation room should feel like: a threshold. When you cross it, you should feel that you’ve entered another atmosphere, a temple space.

Altara feels deeply personal. How did your own story shape it?
Presently in the western world there is a revolution in the understanding of Sacred Space. The quest for regenerative liminal space usually occurs during some form of life transition, major life cycle changes or trauma. When people go through these initiation moments, that can be seen as mini-deaths, they are often searching for some kind of extraordinary space that would allow them to leave an old phase behind and experience initiation in a complete new phase. In many ways, this is how Altara was born. I embarked on this type of quest, in the middle of my own initiations and lessons in loss. Looking back, those moments enabled me to find this extraordinary space and rest in it. When I lost my mother. When I worked with patients facing death. Through my own unraveling. Altara is a way to offer people a place to meet themselves, to grieve, to release, to dream again. Every object, sound, and ritual I create is woven with that intention. Altara became, for me, a way to give form to something invisible, to make beauty serve healing, and to remind us that the sacred can live in our living rooms, in our daily rituals, in how we light a candle and dare to imagine again.

What is the ultimate vision?
Over the last few years, post pandemic holistic trends found their way into hospitality and design. The creation of space became a conscious act, honoring a newfound set of values: holistic design, sustainability, the consumption of wellness and spirituality in togetherness. I am inspired by this movement as it brings revival in ritual leadership and the cultivation of sacred space, an extension of application of what we consider a ‘holy place’ to be, a more inviting, empowering, and permissive way to participate in the creation of our modern temples. I envision a constellation of such modern temples, meditation rooms, hotel sanctuaries, and ritual installations. And maybe Altara’s next chapter is about transforming the way we experience space and how we dream together. To bring the temple home, into community spaces, homes, and hearts.