Albuquerque architect Anthony Anella, AIA, has been paying attention to New Mexico—its land, its history, its cultures—for all his adult life. That’s why his newly completed, award-winning house on a cattle ranch near Romeroville outside Las Vegas, New Mexico, belongs heart and soul to the rock, the weather, and the landscape of where it is. From my point of view, one couldn’t conceive of a structure more ideally suited to its surroundings.

The house was designed for a Chicago financier and his family who bought the 10,000-acre spread some 20 years ago. Anella, who was raised in Albuquerque’s North Valley, called the project for their house “House/Mountain, Prairie, Dance.” The title arises from Anella’s philosophy of design, derived in part from work he did in the 1980s at Mesa Verde National Park on preliminary designs for a new visitors center. An author of a forthcoming book from Island Press titled Preserving Ranchland in the American West and contributor to the groundbreaking anthology Anasazi Architecture and American Design by University of New Mexico Press, Anella’s view of building in New Mexico is to allow architecture to conform to the natural landscape and not impose itself upon it. Site planning for Anella is peculiar to the land’s contours, to its solar conditions, wind fields, water courses, and other considerations. Anella attributes his philosophy to close observations of Anasazi and Pueblo design

strategies as well, allowing parts of other buildings and extensions of the main dwelling to create a “view choreography” as one moves through his residential compound and interacts, through windows high and low, and balconies, with the topography and land forms in view.

The Romeroville house is such a place. Its masonry flows into natural outcroppings. Its sight lines encompass extraordinary long views of the eastern end of the Rocky Mountains, including Hermit’s Peak, as well as the beginning of the great plains that spread out from Las Vegas. The building’s many intimate enclosures and expansive views move people through the landscape of its built environment much as a musical composition would determine pace and rhythm.

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