New Mexico has its own distinctive palette of color that changes as the fashion winds blow through our little corner of the earth. At times we spread our color formulas to the world at large, at other times we borrow from what comes our way. Regardless of which way the wind is blowing, the color sense of New Mexico has its own history and story, rooted, as it is, in this plot of earth.

Color, like smell and taste, has its own woefully inefficient and inadequate vocabulary. We can barely find the words to describe what we see in our color-filled natural world, and we must struggle even more to describe the new rainbows science created for us with the development of chemical dyes and pigments. The hues of nature are often called upon to help us out with this naming task, so we throw out phrases like “sky blue” or “mustard yellow” in hope that we all see and can agree upon the same sky and have in mind the same type of mustard.

Hopeless as this act of putting words to vision may be, what we experience in the refraction of light colors all that we do. Color can embody how we see not only what is before us, but also what is within us. Feeling blue, seeing red, a sunny disposition, green with envy, in the pink: our words try to paint a picture of our moods. These common phrases also signal how important color is to our sense of well-being. New Mexico, with its own palette and vocabulary of color, can make our home interiors and exteriors places that feel rooted to a long tradition of vernacular architecture and design, places that provide us with a sense of belonging.

New Mexico’s colors depend upon our most prized building material—the earth. Outsiders are universally either charmed or appalled by the uniformity of color that our home exteriors present. This response has been going on for hundreds of years, but it hasn’t seemed to influence the fact that New Mexico likes to be an earthbound place, thank you very much. Many communities have codified this preference to ordinance, so important is it to our communal sense of well-being. So, for the most part, our homes are a reflection of the land upon which they sit. Even if few are made of earth—our beloved adobe—and fewer still are plastered with earth pigments, we desire that the exteriors of our homes in New Mexico make solid reference and homage to the past by possessing the appearance of adobe. We are perhaps the only state in the union that makes such a distinctive statement about our identity through our architecture and its color.

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