Sitting on its three-acre lot with the gravitas of Mount Rushmore, the Laird residence manages to be monumental and unpretentious simultaneously. Working against the current trend of “Old World” aspiration among high-end homes around Albuquerque, designer-builder C.E. Laird and his wife, Janice, set out to do something different within the broadest interpretation of Spanish Colonial architecture.

“I have built mostly Pueblo style homes,” Laird explains. “Though I love that style for its soft, sculptural three-dimensional look, I feel that the style has been interpreted so many ways by so many counterfeit adobe frame builders that it has become redundant.” He also wanted the challenge of the fairly strict geometry of a pitched roof without losing the inherent beauty of the adobe: “I was feeling intellectually and architecturally lazy because the flat roof designs are so easy—they can ramble and jog in almost any direction, which incidentally is another reason why I love them.”

Laird considered a classic pitched-roof, northern New Mexico Territorial style house, but he and Janice had become intrigued by the historic California Mission style they were seeing on trips to Santa Barbara.

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