If you wanted to describe Santa Fe in one word, the word would have to be “brown.” Lining city streets, skirting along hillsides, and clinging to ridgetops, scores of adobe-like structures blend with the tones and contours of the earth. The uniform style has a soothing effect, allowing the thrust of mountains and the vault of sky to dominate any horizon. And it is certainly a valid connection to the city’s Spanish and Pueblo Indian past. But it can also be just a bit—well—boring. Elisabeth Sherif’s house is an antidote to the eyes.

The house does not startle. Driving through the pinkish hills north of town, it isn’t even visible until the last moment. Then it seems almost like a natural outcrop of the hill—all angles and hues from the surrounding landscape. The main color, salmon, matches the soil; a purple turret is the shade of mountain shadows; and the dramatic, deep red wall that bisects the house and frames the entry reflects the sunset. This is cool.
Elisabeth knew she wanted a contemporary house. When she was just a child, living on the Oregon coast, her first family home fell into the ocean. “We barely got out,” she recalls. Her mother then hired an architect fresh out of graduate school to design the family’s new home. It turned out to be one of the first examples of Northwest architectural style, the hallmark of which is the liberal use of glass and natural materials such as wood in their natural states. “It was really my mother’s influence that got me interested in creative architecture,” says Elisabeth.

Later, when Elisabeth was a student at Stanford, the family drove to Scottsdale, Arizona, to commission plans for a California house by none other than Frank Lloyd Wright. The house was never built, but the memory is indelible. “It was May and I had on a white cotton frock and sandals,” Elisabeth remembers. “Mr. Wright came to the car to greet us. He was wearing a three-piece black worsted suit, a starched collar, a hat, and carrying a huge black umbrella.” Elisabeth still has the plan—to her knowledge she is the only individual who owns an unexecuted Frank Lloyd Wright plan—and she hopes to build the house one day.