This issue of Su Casa may set a high-water mark for its diversity of featured homes, yet they all still fit inside the big tent of Southwest style, New Mexico flavor. We’ve got ultramodern, classic Modern, Pueblo outside/contemporary inside, neo-Pueblo, Mission, updated Spanish Colonial hacienda, downtown high-rise, and northern New Mexico Territorial straw bale. We’ve also got a huge range of construction techniques, from classic hand-stacked adobe to insulated concrete, straw bales to Rastra. We’ve got a vast rambling family estate for nine and a microhouse for one that even makes its own electricity.

We’ve also got green, exemplified by the aforementioned off-the-grid, northern New Mexico-style straw bale cottage built by Ted Owens and the E-Crete Pueblo house by Life-Style Homes in San Pedro Overlook east of Albuquerque. And on our last page, we bring you an outstanding representative of that Green Granddaddy, the Earthship.

A diverse mix of houses, to be sure, fraternizing on these pages through a compatibility of inspiration. In each case, someone’s creativity sparked when struck against a design challenge. In their individual responses to the call for a fresh design riff on tradition, for instance, or a higher level of energy efficiency in a beautiful home, something new was born. As you can see in the photos from our residential design competition with the American Institute of Architects, Albuquerque chapter, which represents the sharp point of the evolutionary arrow in Southwest home design, the conditions of New Mexico—the history, the geography, the ongoing cultural scrambling—continue to stimulate architects, designers, and builders to higher levels of mastery in the expression of place-centered home design. Lucky us!

Sharp-eyed, long-time readers will notice an absence in this issue—we’ve moved the Home Builders and Remodelers Showcase information into our new supplement, Su Casa Sources. It includes full coverage of the Showcase, with information about all the exhibitors and seminars, plus extensive listings of the New Mexico businesses that supply goods and services related to home building, from builders featured in this magazine to high-design furnishings, from windows to doors to lights to faucets. Su Casa Sources was distributed to Su Casa subscribers and attendees at the Showcase. If you’d like a copy and can’t get to the show March 17–19, call us at 866/256-4925, visit our website (SuCasaMagazine.com), or email Brad Bratcher at bbratcher@sucasamagazine.com. We’ll send you a copy for $2.95 including postage, while supplies last.