inside su casa

at home in New Mexico

By Charles C. Poling
Photograph by Kirk Gittings

This article first appeared in Autumn 2009 Su Casa

For a full-body experience of what the New Mexico home looked like and felt like 100, 200, even 300 years ago, make the trip to El Rancho de las Golondrinas just outside Santa Fe. A sprawling, indoor/outdoor museum of renovated and re-created adobe homesteads, it allows the visitor to spend a few hours inhabiting a Spanish colonial and Mexican-era paradise. Las Golondrinas, featured in this issue as a book excerpt from El Rancho de las Golondrinas: Living History in New Mexico’s La Ciénega Valley, by Carmella Padilla and Jack Parsons, is a touchstone of authentic New Mexico architecture (see page 152).

If you want to see what the New Mexico home looks like today—after all, that is what Su Casa is all about—then check out this year’s Homes of Enchantment Parade, where you can tour and inspect the state of home building here. And it’s in a fine state, as you’ll see, from spectacular custom places like Kayeman Custom Homes’ island-inspired getaway in Placitas to value-laden production homes like Paul Allen Green Built Homes’ well-equipped residences on Albuquerque’s West Mesa. Besides being built by the two Featured Builders in this year’s Parade, this pair has something else in common, high-level Build Green New Mexico standards. Between them they demonstrate how green building continues to spread into every niche of the new-home market.

Beyond their Featured Builder status and green achievements, these two homes couldn’t look more different. Home to its builders Kaye Marshall and Mike Cecchini, the Kayeman place expresses their love of Hawaii and the South Pacific islands through its airy floor plan, soothing sea-worthy colors, vast views, and fluid indoor-outdoor living spaces (see page 84). Among the huge skies and oceanic vistas, it fits. The Paul Allen Green Built Homes house is a marvel of thoughtful design, packing state-of-the-art energy efficiency, water efficiency, and indoor environmental quality into an affordable package in a brand-new yet traditional-style neighborhood, a place of fresh ideas and fresh starts. To read more about this innovative home, turn to page 88. As you continue touring the Parade, you’ll find more custom, semicustom, and production homes in every kind of neighborhood, from the East Mountains to the middle of town, Rio Rancho to Los Lunas.

Speaking of neighborhoods, architect Chris Calott faced the challenge of fitting a new home into a vacant lot in a downtown Albuquerque historic area. The park-side setting and surrounding homes prompted Calott to design a home harmonious with its neighbors in size, scale, and silhouette, yet as you’ll see, the result avoids dry conformity and introduces fresh style without insulting the venerable dignity of the neighboring homes (“New kid on the block,” page 58).

The historical residents of Las Golondrinas surely never imagined a city house like Calott’s, with its Greek and Mexican Modern references, or Kayeman’s with its South Seas vibe, or Paul Allen Green Built Homes’ with its green-on-a-budget efficiencies. But each of these homes—and the 44 other homes you can visit during the Homes of Enchantment Parade tour—responds in its own unique way to the needs of making a life in New Mexico.