Once upon a time—in 1997, actually—a French princess touched down in her Learjet at the Santa Fe airport. Even though it was her first visit to New Mexico, Princess Constance de Polignac felt an immediate and ancient connection with this high desert land. Soon afterward, she was shown a very special house. She fell in love with it, but the house needed attention and renovation. So of course, as fairy tales go, the princess happened upon the perfect builder/designer, with a crew of skilled artisans, to make her vision a reality. This is the story of the princess, the builder, and the house named Desert Flower.

Because it’s a Santa Fe story, it begins with the home’s earliest incarnation, which itself has ties to the ancient Anasazi of Chaco Canyon and the high-tech world of nearby Los Alamos. In the 1960s, a Denver-based engineer named John McGowen “dropped out,” as the term went, and bought 11 acres in the original La Tierra subdivision northwest of Santa Fe. There he gathered builders, solar enthusiasts, and students from these fields to construct the ultimate Whole Earth Catalog-inspired house.

 

 

Seven years into building, the house was the culmination of then cutting-edge solar heating technology and a precursor to the “smart house,” even before the term existed. It featured a 1,200-square-foot passive solar greenhouse, heat sensors in the walls, and Strata tubes with temperature-controlled fans to suck heated air into the mass of rock heat storage beneath the house. Heatilator fireplaces circulated hot water under the floors, and automatic misting systems watered the greenhouse plants. And it was all monitored in a semi-underground “command control center” that employed early Mac computers and was located beneath a large whirlpool tub in the greenhouse. Los Alamos National Laboratory engineers were impressed enough to visit the house for their own computerized heat-loss studies.

To read the complete story, please find Su Casa at your local newsstand or order it online here or by phone at 505-344-1783 or toll-free 866-256-4925.