::DEPARTMENTS::

Inside Su Casa

By Charles Poling
Editor
Su Casa Magazine

In April, Su Casa won a Maggie award, the equivalent of an Oscar for magazines west of the Mississippi. Su Casa took the trophy for most-improved consumer magazine among quarterly, annual, semi-annual, and three-time publications. Winners in other categories included Shape, Road & Track, PC World, and Sunset—pretty good company. We’re particularly proud to be acknowledged for the changes we brought about last year, when we set out to make a good magazine great by improving everything: photography, writing, design, even printing. Recognition by our peers in the Western Publications Association is a particularly sweet affirmation that caring about quality and fussing over every detail counts.

The Maggie is a team prize. Those improvements have depended on the support and patient leadership of our publisher, Jim Folkman, the tireless efforts of our sales staff, Cheryl Mitchell and Ellie Harrington, the organizational mettle and design flair of our art director, Sarah Friedland, and the sharp eyes of copyeditor Elizabeth Wolf. In the “back office” Michelle Eytcheson makes sure every issue reaches our subscribers. Beyond this core team, it’s self-evident that we couldn’t do it without the thoughtful writing and inspiring photography of more than a dozen contributors: Thanks, everyone.

NO STICKS IN THE MUD AROUND HERE
Perhaps because an unbroken, 1,500-year-old architecture tradition surrounds us, Southwestern home design maintains an unusual affinity with the pre-history, history, and natural environment of this region. Architects, designers, and home builders continue to innovate through both serious and playful expressions of updated regionalism. H.L. Cleff Construction Company, featured in this issue, has an apparently genetic claim on building distinctively New Mexican homes. Trenton and Brook Cleff’s homes salute New Mexico’s historic past—even specific architectural landmarks—with a nudge and wink.

Trenton Cleff styled his “church house” on Rio Grande Boulevard in Los Ranchos after the Abiquiu church penned by John Gaw Meem. Cleff’s main residence directly quotes the famously demolished Alvarado Hotel, Albuquerque’s clumsiest anti-preservationist blunder. In another Cleff-designed house, an outdoor room paraphrases Meem’s tower at La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe.
The Cleffs are building in the tradition without kowtowing to it. Glade Sperry and Cindy Terry of Westwork Architects have pulled apart and reassembled tradition in immediately recognizable but startlingly original designs. Monumental yet homey, sometimes in Mr. Potato Head rearrangements of familiar forms, Westwork’s residential designs first stimulate, then upend the viewer’s expectations. The result is deeply satisfying.

Design in the Southwest may have adobe roots, but it sure ain’t stuck in the mud.
Home Builders Association of Central New Mexico
5931 Office Blvd. N.E., Suite 2
Albuquerque, NM 87105
505.344.3294

Copyright 2002
Hacienda Press