The Dué residence in Santa Fe’s Las Campanas district is a house that reveals itself in stages, starting with an unassuming street face enlivened by strikingly handsome garage doors—a feature that rarely earns praise in Su Casa. Inside a small entry gate, things get interesting fast. On my visit, I was stopped cold by the stunning tile mosaic laid into the walkway and the almost medieval frescoes painted in the plaster of the vaulted passage into the courtyard. Here was a spot that just begged to be lingered over.

Next came the semicircular courtyard (irrigated, by the way, with supplemental water captured from the house itself through a complex system of roof gutters, French drains, gray and black water filtration, and underground cisterns). Shading the perimeter, a latilla-roofed portal—or is it a portico?—follows the curve of the house, casting zebra shadows under the noonday sun. A lifelike sculpture by Albuquerque’s Glenna Goodacre graces one hemisphere of this cloistered garden. Starting with that wonderful entry passage, art and architecture welcome one into a residential haven sequestered away from the worries, demands, and chaos of the outside world.

The front courtyard and the intimate façade revealed there, with its columns and arches, the neat rows of latillas on the portal, the copper-capped vigas protruding from the stucco, aptly summarizes the design aesthetic at work here. A premier design by architect Deb Auten, one of Jim Cebak’s favorite

collaborators, the Dué house combines circles with cubes, classic New Mexico adobe details with classical columns, and personal retreat space with public entertaining venues. Double-thick adobe walls give the house the mass of a small asteroid. The effect is baronial.

It’s almost too much to absorb at one time, though Cebak, principal of Cedar Southwest, describes the place as being “not particularly fancy or frou frou. It’s pretty straightforward, like most of our work.” It’s all very Las Campanas—only the best, sometimes to excess—and immaculately executed, which seems to be the Cedar Southwest trademark.

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