It’s definitely quality of space over quantity,” Laura Dean muses, at home in her 780-square-foot, straw-clay house. Relaxing in a vintage-style easy chair, she can gaze upon the side-yard garden or, out another window, across the nearby canyon to heavily forested peaks in the Pecos Wilderness outside Santa Fe.

Somehow Dean’s house doesn’t feel small. The balance of mass, space, and light is just right. So is the proportion of width to height in the pocket-sized great room. Besides, the artistic flourishes and details—the exquisite joinery of the exposed timber frame construction, the hand-cut-tile mosaics, the “see me, feel me, touch me” plaster walls, the massive upward tapering fireplace—all entertain the eye so engagingly that size, well, just doesn’t matter.

From the elevated parking area, a visitor descends a few steps to the house. It nestles into an excavated hill. Although the geography and architecture confound one’s sense of scale, every visual cue reinforces the impression that this is a different kind of house, and certainly not your typical Santa Fe-style casita.

Dean acknowledges that the timber frame, built by Robert Laporte of Econest Building Company in Tesuque, is one of those flourishes that “makes this house special.” Inside, the arching “elephant trunk” beam spanning the living room plays contrapuntally against the right-angled precision orchestrated elsewhere. Indeed, that one arching beam punctuates this home’s difference: the care, craftsmanship, and lucky coincidences that created it. Throughout the building process, if something could be found onsite, salvaged, or made instead of bought off the shelf, then it was crafted—preferably onsite—by loving hands. The quality that Dean refers to often emerged from her own labor.

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