Perhaps the magic comes from the pond out front swarming with lotus, their giant elephant-ear leaves swaying under white blooms kissed with pink. Perhaps it’s the verdant alleé of Siberian elms and cottonwoods canopying the long drive in (“Slow,” a sign reads, “Farmers, Children, Guests”). Perhaps it’s the fecund silence of sanctuary broken only by the petulant, oddly prehistoric cry of the resident peacocks—“ah-RAAah! ah-RAAah!”—like the sound of wish meeting wistfulness, of let this last forever echoed by but how?

Its hundred perfections aside, perhaps the overall magic of Los Poblanos comes from that rare convergence that creates great art: the merging of inspired talent with enlightened patronage. Albert and Ruth Simms hired architect John Gaw Meem—during the Depression, no less—to design the remodel of Los Poblanos’ original ranch house and to create La Quinta Cultural Center, a classic of Territorial Revival style. The buildings remain two of Meem’s finest commissions.

Meem is widely recognized as “the father of Santa Fe style,” but less well known is that he came to New Mexico in the 1920s stricken with tuberculosis—a diagnosis, notes Meem biographer Chris Wilson, that “occasioned a response similar to cancer or HIV today.” It was during his year and a half stay at a Santa Fe sanitarium that the one-time banker discovered his passion for architecture.

 

 

 

Meem recovered, and in fact lived to a ripe old age, but one senses that his brush with death altered his perception forever. Perhaps the awareness of his own mortality honed his discernment and enriched his appreciation of the seen—and the unseen. To every staggering view Meem captured with an artfully placed window or door or archway, he matched an intangible twin, an answering presence throughout his designs that at its base is essentially love. Meem’s genius, it appears, lay in his gratitude to and for life. Albert and Ruth Simms understood what Meem was about, and they wanted it, and they shared the fruit of his labor with the world.

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