In Albuquerque’s North Valley, mailboxes and empty fields serve as landmarks. The odd horse or cow snuffles in its pen. Commerce is unique and often upscale: no franchises here. And old adobe homes, like women of a certain age, eye the comings and goings on Rio Grande Boulevard.

Those who know the proper sequence of mailboxes and fields will find one particular adobe hunkered down—in the most dignified sense of the phrase—somewhere north of Downtown. Down a private gravel road, through wrought iron gates, this aging beauty can charm the most jaded of souls.

The original two-story house, built and first owned by the late Lois Law, a University of New Mexico professor of anthropology, was built in 1935; a single-story wing was added in 1943. With its muscular adobe walls, unique manipulation of interior space, and sturdy-but-cozy proportions, it’s a fairly faithful rendering of Pueblo Revival style, developed in the early decades of the 20th century by the late New Mexico architect John Gaw Meem.

While a charming home is a wonderful thing, its seductive glow can mask the fevered flush of physical ills. Fortunately the owners, a business-savvy married couple who purchased the 2.25-acre property in mid-2003, were aware of its shortcomings from the start. “We knew that there were major issues,” says our guide du jour, the female member of the duo. “We got the place pretty much for the cost of the land.” That was a good thing, considering that at closing, about half of the home’s 1,800 square feet was in dire need of demolition.

Whoever first advanced the opinion that “the devil is in the details” was oh-so-wrong. What made this place worth saving is those very details: The original hammered iron hinges and handles, the lintels faithfully inset above windows and doors, the closets outfitted with their own curious little windows, the old windows that traveled to the Midwest to be restored. Like a beloved but eccentric aunt, this house is filled with countless tiny surprises.

 

 

 

Architect Ed Fitzgerald and associate Rod Herrera shared the couple’s belief that the place had potential. “The proportions of the house were consistent with traditional Spanish colonial architecture,” Fitzgerald explains. So the goal of the project became “to preserve as much as possible while stabilizing and updating it, making it more comfortable and adding practical living space in a respectful way.” It’s a lofty aspiration, and a rather tricky one, like volunteering to finish the last manuscript of a late, great author. Architect Fitzgerald proved he was more than up to the task.

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