Albuquerque builder Scott Bealhen was too busy to notice when architect Sarah Susanka's bestseller, The Not So Big House, hit the market. In fact, Bealhen didn't read Susanka's book until a colleague recommended it, saying it was about "what you've been doing for years."

As well as sharing a preference for smaller, more personal houses over gigantic, generic ones, Bealhen and Susanka share an upper Midwest origin—Wisconsin and Minnesota, respectively. Their differences soon emerge, however. Susanka's book features house styles from the Great Lakes area, but Bealhen went through a drastic architectural change after moving to New Mexico in 1992.

"For a while," he recalls, "I continued using the same traditional techniques: pitched roofs, chair and crown moldings, trim on every window."

Not for long. The first high-desert design surprise Bealhen encountered were city lots shaped the opposite of Wisconsin's typical wide, shallow properties. Albuquerque's deeper city lots with narrower frontages prompted him to rethink home design.

"I gradually got used to the look of New Mexico architecture," Bealhen says. "What finally convinced me was the way these houses fit on the land. With the flat roofs, they can be designed to step up and down with the lot's topography in a way that's less obtrusive than other building styles." Bealhen also likes the diversity of local architecture, "everything from Scottsdale style to traditional to modern."

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Copyright 2001
Hacienda Press