Following designer Joaquin Karcher through archways and under vaulted ceilings at Dallas and Ingrid Parker’s home near Taos becomes a tour of surprises. Joaquin favors eccentricity and points out a beam whose edges aren’t quite true, deliberately. He notes how the glazed tile in the shower changes color with a tilt of your head. He knows every detail intimately— he designed the house. But even beyond the home’s design, he knows where the lumber came from to build it, and this last detail is important.

“To me, using what’s close at hand like the local mud for bricks is what makes a house green and sustainable,” explains Joaquin, a Taos designer for 16 years. He specifies that the big beams came from a sawmill in Chama, New Mexico.

Within direct view of Taos Mountain, this rounded house sits on five acres, and even before construction began, it had already gathered quite a story. For years Dallas and Ingrid Parker of Houston longed to build a house in the area. Dallas’ brother, a Taoseño since the early 1980s, lived in a “hippie-built” house, and if you’ve been to Taos, you know the kind— rough-sawn paneling, crumbling adobe walls. Still, the round room and windows “in funny places” held a charm the Parkers wanted to emulate. “We wanted it whimsical, something completely different from our three-story townhouse in Houston,” says Ingrid. “We wanted it fun and casual.”

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