::FEATURE ARTICLES::

Every Room Tells a Story

Northwest of Albuquerque near the village of Corrales, high-tech development and urban growth claim once barren ridges. Traffic hums around sparkling new neighborhoods and funnels over bridges on the Rio Grande. The big river—big by desert standards, anyhow—flows in calm patterns heedless of the human energy careening around it. Overhead a hawk follows an ancient predatory pattern, ignoring the cars and bridges and neighborhoods, scanning instead the forested river bank in hopes of glimpsing a chance movement.

Nestled among cottonwoods by the old riverside levy, where the occasional fisherman wanders along the banks, sits a 70-some-odd-years-old adobe, fresh from its seventh or eighth remodeling. Once nothing more than a 19th-century Santa Fe Railroad boxcar, this home has grown through a process of division and multiplication into a sprawling, meandering adobe that bears the stamp of each owner who has dwelled in this peaceful, secluded setting.
It all started one day when a shepherd, whose flock grazed this corner of the Alameda grant, dragged in a surplus boxcar to shelter his sheep now that the river had been levied by the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District. But the boxcar was too good for livestock, so the shepherd added a tiny kitchen with a cook stove and moved in. Soon he must have needed a bigger place to lie down, so he brought in adobes and added another room and then another. The trees got bigger and so did what was now a house.

At some point a family with children moved in. They needed more room. Later, another family came. Now the additions began in earnest. Special wooden lintels, handmade doors, cubbies, and cupboards began popping up in the rooms that flowed and swirled around a still tiny kitchen.

Much of the cabinetry is the work of Lewis R. Binford, one of the home’s several former owners. A professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico, Binford also found time to do woodcarving. As a youngster in the South during World War II, he was taught by elderly master craftsmen who filled in as teachers when the war effort emptied the classrooms. This early love of carving and craft found an easy home in New Mexico, where the emphasis on hand-hewn wooden details in homes has a long history.

Binford filled his Corrales home with numerous carved details such as doors, cabinets, shelves, and even Mayan hieroglyphics, which he scribed onto a lintel over a doorway leading from the entry to the bedroom wing. The home’s personal mythology also extends to a corner shelf believed to be made of a scrap from the original Arizona tree trunk studied by the creator of dendrochronology, the science of tree ring dating. This wee shelf is but one example of how in his home Binford brought together his vocation, anthropology, and his avocation, wood carving.

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Photo © Kirk Gittings

Design cues like this massive, dark lintel and exposed adobe wall by the new staircase to the master suite help blend the new addition with the existing structure.