From the front, Donald Graham’s high-country retreat suggests Tibet: the house perches on a steep sideslope, grass sprouting like a crewcut on the roof, wide overhangs shielding the plaster walls from weather, native-stone steps leading down to the entry. Nudging above the “living roof,” forested peaks rise over 9,000 feet.

The east side, however, marked by three rhythmic windows topped by wooden lintels and aspen trees planted against a coyote fence, winks at an errant Southwestern gene. Keep circling the house to the south side, and it reveals another ancestral influence. Here, above a courtyard of rough stone, bordered by a dry-stacked stone retaining wall, the house soars 20 feet high, with tall windows bathing the great room in sunlight on an autumn day. At one end of the courtyard, a stone shower pours off a flat slab atop the retaining wall; at the other, a hot tub overlooks the near hills and the far distant sagebrush flats and mountains of the greater Taos district. Smaller windows and sliding doors, off-angle wall intersections, a textured trombe wall—what’s all this? Southwest mountain solar modern?

“Beyond category” perhaps best describes this natural-flavored Sangre de Cristo getaway designed by Vishu Magee in close communication with client Graham. Magee, a long-time house designer in Taos and columnist for Su Casa, says he found in Graham “a rare confluence of vision. In a sense, Don was going to live the dream of house-in-wilderness that I had never been able to realize for myself.”

 

 

 

Graham had been nursing that vision for a decade. A top fashion photographer, his images grace the pages of magazines like Elle and Rolling Stone, while his work has hung in the Metropolitan Museum. His career orbits New York City. But every year, Graham would take two-week road trips through the American West, shaping his impressions and desires into a vision of a place where he could spend half his time—precious time—away from the urban world.

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