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DEPARTMENTS Inside Su
Casa
Su Casa often patrols the blurry boundaries between architecture and design, art and architecture. This issue is no exception, with its focus on interiors and their opposite, homesites. New Mexico’s colorful, dramatic, and varied landscape, vivid high altitude light, and centuries-old—OK, millennia-old—inventory of human dwellings and strongly graphical textile and ceramic tradition have seduced artists and the aesthetically sensitive for generations. The state might be short on exploitable resources, but we are way long on beauty. For some of us, beauty starts at home. In her Santa Fe foothills home, Hillary Riggs has erased the line between art and interior design. (See “Line of sight,” page 74.) A painter who works in a variety of media, Riggs designed her house as a place to create and also display her work. Carved and painted doors, window valances, and chairs gleefully compete for attention with her fine art sculptures and paintings. The elements that pass as design may lack the nuanced layers of meaning and archetypal resonance of her art, but they sure delight the viewer. The residential compound of Nicasio and Janet Stein Romero near Las Vegas, New Mexico, inverts the equation. Here, the architecture often is the art, particularly in pieces like Nicasio’s phone-booth-sized, mud-plastered Millennium Pod, which satirizes techno-lust, or the sunken kiva, breast-shaped hornos, and nearby soaring adobe tower assembled in an allegorical tableau of New Mexican iconography, rich with psychological implications. (See “Ecstasy of expression,” page 160.) Somewhere in between art as design and architecture as art, antique dealer Julie Vaughan has decked out her Santa Fe casita in vignettes of humble, even primitive Americana. (See “Quirky & perfect in Santa Fe,” page 84.) Often assembled by untutored artisans and gilded with a luminous patina by generations of use, her pairings and groupings dignify these objects as found art. Simplicity and authenticity are two esteemed virtues in most of New Mexico’s most treasured buildings. Rustic Americana looks right at home. At Vaughan’s, call it the art of selection and placement—really, when you strip away trend and theory, isn’t that what interior design is all about?
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As day without night, “interior” comes into being only in dynamic balance with what’s outside. A tremendous sky over sculpted earth, agitated or pacified by the moment’s weather, define New Mexico. Every house, from a West Mesa tract home to an adobe ridgetop redoubt, responds to this extraordinary geographic circumstance. Every homesite occupies a piece of it—mid-North Valley infill lot, downtown loft, suburban condo, wherever you might build. Every house has a window, too, which Christine Mather suggests in Home at Last (see “Frame of mine,” page 67) creates the original frame, containing the view as a work of art itself. Landscape in a window frame might be the blurriest boundary of all between architecture and art, between interior design and the spotless beauty of creation.
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