a place called home
A weathered gate at the Krupnick residence in Corrales, New Mexico, survived a whole-house makeover to maintain a sense of continuity with the area’s architectural past.
When Michael and Kim Krupnick bought their home in Corrales, New Mexico, a few years ago, they faced a choice. While it might charitably have been called a fixer-upper, the 40-year-old adobe had sagged and sunk into a sorry state. Someone had suggested tearing it down and building perhaps a barrel-tile-roofed, Old World–flavored mansion on the gracious cottonwood-studded lot a few steps from the Rio Grande bosque. But something in the proportions and massing of the house, with its two-story great room and low-slung bedroom wing, stayed their hand—something, too, in the elegant adobe haciendas on sprawling lots and even in the crumbling casitas forgotten at the ends of corn fields.
Given this setting, the Krupnicks decided to revive the house without altering its profile. The place looks great, not least because it belongs here, nestled deep among the farms and riverside woods of a historic village. (See our cover and “True to form” on page 72.)
Across the river and several miles south sits architect Mark Rohde’s dramatically modern home, a polar opposite of Krupnicks’. Yet the two share an inspired sensitivity to place, to their cultural and physical settings. Rohde’s residence perches on a hill west of the University of New Mexico overlooking Interstate 25, the office and hotel towers of the city’s reawakened downtown, and the oceanic expanses of the West Mesa.
Talk about site! Villa Marquette, as writer Elmo Baca calls it, says a lot about Albuquerque’s once and present aspirations, about the region’s emergence from provincial center to globally connected player. The home earned Rohde an honor award in the 2008 Su Casa/American Institute of Architects residential design awards competition; streetside, it demurely conforms in scale and landscaping to its Albuquerque neighborhood, while in back it expands far beyond regional traditionalism. Yet surrounded by high-rises and the remodeled Big I, the house fits right in. (To view all the Su Casa/AIA winners, go to aiaabq.org/sucasa.htm.)
That modern flair also reveals itself in a house by Homes of Enchantment Parade Featured Builder Otley Smith. The home (see “Something new,” page 120) brings Asian minimalism to the Sandia Mountain foothills of Albuquerque; his featured Parade home in La Cuentista on the West Mesa addresses green building in a contemporary Southwestern design. Not far to the north, D.R. Horton, also Featured Builder in the Parade, builds family homes with all the amenities buyers expect these days. In the middle of Rio Rancho, Pulte Homes is creating a whole new community in walking distance from schools, a library, ball fields, and the like.
Writer William deBuys and photographer Alex Harris drill deep into the meaning of community, of being a buen vecino or good neighbor in an isolated New Mexico mountain hamlet in their book River of Traps. We’re lucky enough to bring you new material from this pair of collaborators whose words and images convey the texture of village life. Their work is a celebration of place in all its rumpled glory. Pursuing that sense of connection to a place called home motivates many of us as we search for a new house or a builder on the Parade, consider a major remodeling job, or simply rearrange the living room furniture. Happy hunting!