Su Libro
fantasy living

Pick your pleasure and escape into the realms of haciendas, real-world adobe architecture, and New Mexico’s great outdoors.

By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Spring 2009 Su Casa

Haciendas: Spanish Colonial Houses in the U.S. and Mexico, by Linda Leigh Paul, principal photography by Ricardo Vidargas, Rizzoli, hardcover, $55.

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The notion of a hacienda as a country estate—perhaps with cattle, horses, and sheep grazing on arid grassland pastures under a vast blue sky—has been watered down in real estate parlance to mean nearly any vaguely Mexican or Spanish style house with upwardly mobile aspirations. Banish such banal thoughts, dear reader. Haciendas by Linda Leigh Paul has arrived on the bookshelf to set you straight.

And what a lovely comeuppance it delivers.

Through page on page of lust-provoking nearly edible photography by Ricardo Vidargas (and others), Haciendas provides the best kind of armchair tour through 25 homes in the Southwestern United States and Mexico, restoring meaning to its eponymous subject. Hacienda shall henceforth refer to a sprawling estate in the style of Spanish Colonial architecture with massive walls, protected courtyards, deeply shaded loggias, burbling fountains, stone columns, murals and frescoes and reflecting pools and arches, arches, arches. In every home you’ll find somber medieval paintings of biblical scenes, Roman Catholic iconography, sumptuous pillows and Oriental rugs, massive canopy beds and stone tubs and stone-walled kitchens with the latest in appliances, serape-draped chairs and sombreros and baskets and antique wooden farm tools hanging like art on the walls.

Sure it’s a fantasy. We live in postmodern times. Deal with it. Today if you have the money and the imagination, you, your designer, and your contractor can create whatever you dream up. Authenticity in architecture and design derives from an act of will, not a cultural circumstance. Want a Mexican hacienda? One Jeannie blink later—oh, and five years of design, determination, dogged work, and dog-eared checkbook later—you walk through the entry gate and into the vestibule of your new/old family seat.

But just because it’s a fantasy doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Savvy author Paul approaches this mentality with a measured if stoutly unironic perspective, bringing a grounding sense of rigor to the book, as if to say, “OK, we’re making this up as we go, but here are the rules of play.”

Refreshingly aware of the ironies underpinning the book, Paul offers considerable insight into the psyche of her audience and their motivation. Quoting Charles Linn, who suggested that a particular Las Vegas club “had the power to ‘inspire nostalgia for experiences people probably never even had,’” Paul creates a rationale for such longings that goes beyond mere escapism or pleasure seeking. She argues that “it is exciting that one might believe she is nostalgic for things and places she has never known, and far more extraordinary perhaps is the desire for places and things that have never existed. The desire for a stimulating architectural spatial experience can itself be an ideal.”

Take, for instance, the hacienda. It embodies Platonic forms, she suggests: “They separate, they connect, they contain everything.” Indulging in pseudo-nostalgic architecture, then, inspires enduring, even transcendent experiences. So nostalgia helps us “learn to infuse the present with the comfort of authentic, ritualistic events and customary purpose.” But only when the present won’t suffice, one might add. I can’t imagine the dons of Spanish colonial Mexico worried much about subprime mortgages. Why not escape to those times?

Whatever—it’s your money. If you want to build a nueva hacienda, this book’s for you. Paul rambles back and forth across the border to bring readers these gorgeous and quite distinct estates. In some cases you have to look pretty hard to tell the modern American versions from their Mexican ancestors. Sometimes you don’t: The ruins of the Hacienda San Diego de Jaral de Berrios convey an overpowering aristocratic grandeur, even in their current state of decrepitude. Gothic, baroque, Moorish, with fantastic murals, carved stone, domed ceilings—the magnitude of vanished wealth on display transcends any modern equivalent, at least in New Mexico. Not that the contemporary homes lack juice, but by contrast the DeGolyer Hacienda in Dallas, for instance, looks demure, despite the inevitable gloss of antebellum Southern propriety.

The architect Roberto Burillo’s contemporary home wears the DNA stamp of its hacienda forebears in its stone door surrounds, grottolike outdoor dining area, Moorish passageways, and intricately vaulted brick ceilings. Another Burillo home blends the same theme with the sharp lines and planar walls of Mexican contemporary architecture. The house would look right at home in Las Campanas de Santa Fe.

The Rancho dos Vidas by Michael G. Imber Architects in south Texas pulls off the new-old hat trick particularly well, with classic Spanish Colonial architecture in a richly detailed compound creating a self-contained private world of luxury amid the harsh desert. A Sonoma County, California, home by Marley + Wells Architects appropriately dips its inspiration from the well of the California Spanish design tradition. It shows the ever-amazing strong kinship shared by this style with some New Mexico architecture, like distant cousins meeting: don’t I know you?

Books like Haciendas usually succeed or fail based on the homes they open up to their readers. This title delivers the goods, but it gains credibility from Paul’s particular thoughtfulness. Instead of fawning over a fairly superficial design trend, she digs deeper both into the roots of the architecture and its cultural meaning. I’ll bet that leads to better homes by readers who study the book. Her rumination on the role of nostalgia in residential architecture should resonate with folks in the building industry here. We’ve seen trends come and go, from classic Santa Fe style to “Tuscan” contemporary style. But the unasked question in Haciendas is how does such faux-style architecture relate to the community at large? Architecture interacts with culture as do painting, literature, and music. What’s brought to the culture, or subtracted from it, when we create fantasy homes?

Consider, too, that other motives besides pseudo-nostalgia might inspire re-creating a period hacienda. Ward Alan Minge comes to mind. He created a faux-real hacienda called Casa San Ysidro in Corrales, New Mexico. Now owned by the Albuquerque Museum, the place gives a unique glimpse into the architecture and folkways of various specific periods of New Mexico history. Minge didn’t preserve so much as re-create, right down to building new with salvaged materials. At the casa, tourists, New Mexico natives, and the simply curious can glimpse and reflect upon a way of life that might be gone but still resonates in our architecture, our food, our politics . . . Minge didn’t create the place as a museum, but as a residence, and it connects not to a set of Platonic ideals but to a living, evolving New Mexican culture, continuing the dialogue between residential design and, well, residents.

Untold New Mexico: Stories from a Hidden Past, by Jason Silverman, foreword by Governor Bill Richardson, Sunstone Press, paperback, $19.95.

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This collection of magazine columns by author Jason Silverman serves up an intriguingly diverse assortment of brief essays on people who have either had an impact on or been affected by New Mexico during the last several generations. Writing in a breezy, light-footed journalistic style—and making no claims to being a historian—Silverman scores points for reporting on offbeat topics, little-known anecdotes about famous people, and salient histories of familiar places. He talks about University Arena in Albuquerque, for instance—the famous Pit—by recounting the legendary NCAA basketball championship victory of underdog North Carolina State and its gregarious coach, Jim Valvano.

Silverman squeezes the real juice of Untold New Mexico, though, from the out-of-context or I-didn’t-know-that anecdotes: Martha Graham, the groundbreaking modern dance choreographer, loved New Mexico since a girlhood train stop in Albuquerque. Much of her dance work drew inspiration from Pueblo and Hispanic rituals she observed here in adulthood. As directed by her will, friends spread her ashes at Truchas. What about Dennis Hopper’s wild-and-crazy post-Easy Rider days in Taos? What a madman. And you can still find plenty of locals who remember. On a more sober note, Silverman’s quick take on Senator Dennis Chávez’s tireless civil rights advocacy brings an important New Mexican—an honorable, decent, fair-minded politician with a long legacy of positive influence in state politics—back into the limelight.

Many of the stories are spiced with a “spotlight” section that brings in other points of view and other writers’ voices or extends the tale with resource-style information, whether it’s a list of New Mexico songs to counterpoint the piece on Buddy Holly’s seminal rock-and-roll recordings made in Clovis or a bit about Peter Fonda’s lost Western movie The Hired Hand (remember that one?) to offset the Hopper piece. And Silverman seeks balance in covering Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo subjects and perspectives, while freely admitting his relative-newcomer status—sometimes the new eye brings a fresh perspective, even if he’s been here for decades now.

A Field Guide to the Plants and Animals of the Middle Rio Grande Bosque, by Jean-Luc E. Cartron, David C. Lightfoot, Jane E. Mygatt, Sandra L. Brantley, and Timothy K. Lowrey, University of New Mexico Press, paperback, $21.95.

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Albuquerque enjoys a triumvirate of geographical blessings: the Sandia Mountain wilderness to the east, the West Mesa with its volcanoes and petroglyph-adorned escarpment, and the Rio Grande bosque unwinding gently through the city between them. I’ve heard it called the world’s largest cottonwood forest. That might be an unsubstantiated claim, but the Middle Rio Grande bosque does stretch from below Cochiti Dam 175 miles to the head of Elephant Butte Reservoir largely uninterrupted and undisturbed by the hands of man.

Sort of. That’s the paradox of the bosque: it’s a thick, wild, seemingly pristine place, a complete riverside ecosystem according to this Field Guide. Yet humans tamed it and shaped its present form, particularly by channeling the Albuquerque reach 80 years ago and, of course, imposing a flood control regime with Cochiti Dam, which was completed in 1973, and other dams upstream. Photos of the Albuquerque area from before the early 20th century show a more braided, meandering stream, occasional thick forests, soggy marshlands, and lakes in still-water oxbows. The thick forest we know today developed after engineers dredged the sandy bed and installed jetty jacks to contain the main stream between the tall levies on either side.

Ironically, without the periodic natural flooding of earlier times, the forest has grown more dense but cannot sustain itself. Cottonwood seedlings need annual flooding to reach maturity. The trees we enjoy now are aging, with no successors in sight.

Solving that problem lies beyond the scope of the Field Guide, however. In these pages you’ll find a description of every plant and animal you might encounter in these woods—even the ultrarare black bear or mountain lion. Of more common use are the comprehensive plant listings, the birds, the rodents, the insects, the reptiles, and all the furry, fluttering, or winged critters that scramble through the leaf-litter, dash up tree trunks, swoop in large flocks onto the quiet waters and sandbars, be they year-round residents or migratory passersby.

Early chapters of the Field Guide cover the area’s geography and environmental history. Then in classic field guide form, the authors have organized the listings of plants and animals into broad categories where they give taxonomy, identification, natural history, status, the months or seasons the subject occurs in the bosque, and a photograph. If you have a question that can’t be answered by this book, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree or at least misguided in your query.

Designer Plant Combinations: 105 Stunning Gardens Using Six Plants or Fewer, by Scott Calhoun, Storey Publishing, paperback, $18.95.

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Garden writer Scott Calhoun’s latest book, Designer Plant Combinations, shows how you can create beautiful gardens with a handful of plants by paying attention to color, structure, spacing, groupings, and setting. Calhoun’s approach acknowledges that a gardener has at least a zillion choices and the novice can wander lost endlessly in a mental arboretum. How do you get started? Go to the experts. Calhoun brings you more than 100 suggestions for plant combinations from a handful of top garden designers coast to coast.

Try putting giant-flowered purple sage with sotol, as suggested by David Salman, whose High Country Gardens in Santa Fe is one of the area’s leading nurseries. Ideally suited to hot, dry, rocky gardens, this combo sports silvery tones “sexier than stainless steel kitchen appliances, lending an edgy, hip aesthetic to your garden,” according to Salman.

Salman isn’t the only New Mexican featured in Designer Plant Combinations. Our own columnist Judith Phillips suggests a palette of gray-greens by planting cactus and Apache plume (one of my favorite desert shrubs) while Santa Fe’s Julia Berman recommends globe thistle and Mexican feathergrass, a delicate and hardy grass that brings a shimmer wherever it grows.
Each of the combinations gets a two-page spread in the book with color photos and a descriptive overview. Calhoun writes about how to grow these particular plants, including their hardiness zone and their dimensions when fully mature. A sidebar called “Designer Tips” offers alternative plants, bedding advice, and various other tricks of the trade.

Given the book’s national scope, it’s not surprising that Calhoun (who writes from Tucson) doesn’t emphasize xeric plants, but he still provides plenty of low-water-use combinations for us desert dwellers. Use this well-conceived, well-crafted book to simplify your garden planning as you head toward the local nursery on a warm and windy spring day. As Calhoun writes, “good plant combinations are a little like the stanzas of a poem. That is . . . they are not trying to be a whole garden but a self-contained little part of one.”

Backyards: A Sunset Design Guide, by Bridget Biscotti Bradley and the editors of Sunset Books, paperback, with design software DVD, $22.95.
Patio & Stone: A Sunset Design Guide, by Tom Wilhite and the editors of Sunset Books, paperback, with design software DVD, $22.95.

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Purchase book Patio & Stone: A Sunset Design Guide

Two extensive, nay, voluminous books from Sunset Publishing Corporation, the folks who bring you Sunset magazine, cover a vast geography of backyard landscapes. At once inspirational and aspirational, Backyards and Patio & Stone cover everything from terrific examples of places few can afford to concrete—er, sorry for the pun—advice on how to turn your private patch into a miniresort retreat two steps from the patio door.

The books follow the same format—and use some of the same photos!—which means hundreds of pictures and pithy accompanying text that often merely translates the visually obvious to the explicit word. Still, advice on how high to hang the radiant heaters over the patio might prevent you from setting a tall visitor’s hair on fire. And tips from a landscape designer will spare you from wandering lost off the main path to backyard bliss.

Backyards covers a huge range of ideas for outdoor dining, outdoor kitchens, playhouses, office cottages, storage sheds, pools and spas, walkway surfaces, courtyards, patios. Tips cover fabrics, plants, hard surface materials, even how to build a regulation bocce court. The regional emphasis includes a lot of California options and far fewer xeric or desert scapes, but the emphasis on easy, shaded living applies anywhere.

While the two books do overlap, Patio focuses more tightly on hardscape. That means patios, flagstone paths, stone walls, masonry staircases and seating, boulder arrangements, container gardening, pebble mosaics, brick walkway patterns, driveways, lighting, fire pits and ponds and pools.
In both books, the how-to advice remains superficial, pointing you in a general direction without taking you step by step through a project or process. The design software lets you electronically envision your yard in various scenarios—useful for the computer inclined, but not necessarily better than the napkin sketch unless you’re a trained professional.

Adobe Houses for Today: Flexible Plans for Your Adobe Home, New and Revised, by Laura Sanchez and Alex Sanchez, Sunstone Press, paperback, $29.95.

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This updated edition of the adobe house plan book Adobe Houses for Today adds a new chapter, “Stories from the Field,” that shows homes built from the designs covered in the previous chapters. Since Sunstone Press first published this successful book by longtime Su Casa contributor Laura Sanchez and her husband, Alex, several years ago, dozens of folks have taken the plans, sometimes modified or adapted them to their own needs, and built houses from them—not all of adobe, by the way, despite the persuasive early chapter debunking the negative myths about this ancient building material.

Now many of those reader-builders have written back to the Sanchezes with their proud stories, from which the authors have selected a representative handful. These homes range from Casas Grandes and a beachfront community on the Sea of Cortez in Mexico to Silver City to Taos and Old Town Albuquerque in New Mexico to central Arizona. As the black-and-white photos make clear, the book’s plans make for lovely compact houses in the design tradition of New Mexico.

The 12 plans share an economy of dimension, but their variety means just about anyone looking for a not-so-big adobe (or adobe style) home will find one that suits. The Sanchezes write a brief narrative describing key aspects of each home plan, then provide a series of drawings that include floor plans, 3-D computer renderings, and elevation drawings. The plans even include alternate expansion plans for many of them, like the building-block pueblo house (plan 12) designed as a basic module that can be hooked with others like it to create a compound or pueblo—pretty sweet for accommodating aging in-laws or stay-at-home adult children.

Other chapters cover the history of New Mexico adobe building, issues of siting, energy-efficient construction, and an overview of construction methods. But maybe the best thing about this excellent book is the case it makes for building with adobe, which sometimes seems to be a forgotten tradition. Whether you’re a die-hard mud head or a new-adopter considering insulated concrete forms, this book probably has a design for your next house.