With its spacious light-filled rooms, fireplace spanning two stories, exquisite custom furniture built-ins, and grand views of the Rio Grande bosque, the secluded Tuscan estate offered by RayLee Custom Homes indisputably announces “you’ve arrived.”

Designed by luxury home designer Eric Spurlock, the estate is located in the private gated community of Villa del Rio, bordering the Rio Grande just minutes from Albuquerque’s historic Old Town, with easy access to Downtown and I-40. Villa del Rio encompasses 25 home sites on 16 1/2 acres adjacent to the bosque. Homes here begin at 2,500 square feet, priced from $450,000. This featured estate is approximately 4,500 square feet. Constructed on half-acre lots, the homes in Villa del Rio fill a niche for those seeking luxury riverside living at a more affordable price than is generally available, says Scott Grady, president of RayLee Homes.

Grady, a third-generation builder and native New Mexican, and his wife, Laura, established the company in 1976. Today, RayLee Custom is the custom home division of the 12th-fastest growing home builder in America, Vantage Homes/RayLee Homes, as ranked by Builder Magazine’s Fast Track of Builders. Since 1990, RayLee has been building custom homes in Santa Fe in exclusive locations such as Las Campanas. The RayLee Custom team includes Grady, veteran Houston home builder and president of Vantage Homes Vincent “Vinny” Pizzonia, named by the National Association of Homebuilders as Marketing Director of the Year, and construction supervisor Robert Feeney.

Together as well as individually, this team knows home construction from the bottom up and from the inside out. Grady started out “swinging a hammer,” while Feeney began his career with the company in 1979 as a painting contractor. Their long association has nurtured a collective sense of innovation, creativity, substance, and value visible in every home they build together.

Little is lost in translation at RayLee Custom’s Tuscan estate on the Rio Grande. This “American” version lets in far more light than the European original, and it includes state-of-the-art kitchen and bath appliances and fixtures. Natural terra cotta barrel clay roof tiles above a smooth, acid-stained fawn stucco exterior with authentic masonry stone accents create an Old World impression. From the entryway on, the entire structure invokes the warm, serene experience of a venerable Tuscan residence.