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The thing called home
At Su Casa, we celebrate
regional style in home building partly because it’s
a way to honor our local culture, our communities,
and that elusive quality called the spirit of place.
Homes that acknowledge and interact with their locale
enrich the cultural vibrancy of the region.
Southwestern interior design as a category, however, remains an unfenced frontier. No one quite knows where the boundaries are or what lies over the horizon. Southwestern design encompasses an admittedly exasperating, eclectic range of styles in furnishings, surfaces, wall finishes, window treatments, art, functional craftwork, and all manner of accessories. Most of us might not be able to define it, but we know it when we see it. If you could somehow stuff a John Gaw Meem–designed adobe home with every brilliant, tacky, typical, stereotypical, clichéd, or cutting-edge Southwest style interior design element—from a Mexican colonial trastero to a carved coyote wearing a neckerchief, an R. C. Gorman painting to a Three Grey Hills Navajo rug, Talavera tile to a hand-painted santo—you would end up stocking a visual salad bar far exceeding the most voracious appetite. And you still wouldn’t clear the plate. |
Whether in architecture or interior design, the definition we work with at Su Casa describes, but doesn’t prescribe. It’s based on principles, not rules, and goes like this: Southwest style results when designers, builders, and architects respond uniquely to the historical traditions, built environment, cultural conditions, geography, and climate of this region. For one working example, look at interior designer Susan Westbrook, winner of the Su Casa Southwestern Style Award and profiled on page 60. Westbrook drew heavily on traditional New Mexican and Mexican colonial furnishings in her historically minded renovation of a Pueblo-Territorial home in Albuquerque’s North Valley. The house feels so alive, with its contemporary art, sleek kitchen, enthusiastic use of vivid paint, and mixed 20th-century living room furniture, that it could never be mistaken for the historically correct Casa San Ysidro museum in Corrales, for instance, which faithfully recreates an earlier era. Perhaps it’s Westbrook’s sense of play and humor that enlivens the place. And in this postmodern time when we’re free to create and express meaning in the objects around us, a strong sense of region—of place—can ground us in the larger reality beyond our individual selves, while a sense of play keeps us from thinking our way is the only way to create the thing called home. |
