modern outlook
The Jemez Mountains around Los Alamos, New Mexico, provide the ideal stage for a contemporary home locked by design into its natural surroundings.
Adjacent to the living room, a deck seems to rise among the ponderosa pines at this canyon-side home in Los Alamos.
Tall leaning steel posts and an upswept roof add to the aspirational feeling at this Los Alamos home.
The house keeps a low profile from the street, letting the topography absorb its multiple stories.
The stairs descend from a bridge (leading to a study) to the lower level and master bedroom. A massive fireplace block penetrates both levels.
At ground level on this sloping lot, the main floor includes the kitchen and living room.
This article first appeared in Spring 2009 Su Casa
Light and shadow, rock and forest, mass and space—nature paints its canvas with seemingly random forms, creating a balance and harmony that human artistry can rarely match. Viewing the natural world replenishes our souls. We build shelter from our environment but desire its proximity. When a home bridges indoors and outdoors, it invites us to linger, to spend each moment savoring the brush strokes of sun, moon, and season.
Los Alamos, New Mexico, might seem an unlikely setting for such a home. Quintessentially a company town, this international community of scientists, engineers, and support workers centers on the prestigious Los Alamos National Laboratory. Government buildings and high fences mark the laboratory’s vast technical areas, but wind into the nearby mountain ridges and you will find gracious neighborhoods set among the cliff tops and pine-clad ridges.
Against this dramatic setting Stan Primak, a retired building trades teacher and owner of Primak Builders, owned a canyon-side lot that would have kept many in his profession awake at night. Along a steep street in a new neighborhood that emerged after the devastating Cerro Grande Fire in 2000, the lot was scarred by flames and dropped sharply into a rock-faced canyon. Instead of seeing the lot as a dilemma, Primak saw it as a challenge. Having built many houses in the area, mostly variants on the traditional Pueblo style that dominates northern New Mexico architecture, he was “tired of doing the same old thing,” he recalls. “I wanted to do something new and exciting. People move to Los Alamos from all over the country and all over the world and bring their design taste with them, so it’s possible to build in a variety of styles.”
Conventional wisdom says modern houses are a tough sell in northern New Mexico, but Primak took that bold step anyway, giving Santa Fe architect William Agnew carte blanche to design a house that would fit the lot. “He said go for it, do what you want,” Agnew recalls. Architects rarely get this level of freedom, and Agnew recognized it as a rare opportunity. “I’m happy to work in the local style,” he continues, “but I’ve always appreciated modernism because it’s so flexible. When you’re working in a particular style you have fewer options, but with modernism you can do what you want to intensify design and lock your house into the landscape.”
The architect has always believed that living spaces should have a fundamental relationship with the land. “You go out and see where the sun is, where the mountains are, where the streets and neighbors are, and what the weather is like, and it gives you a lot to work with,” he explains. “Then you have the ability to come up with something that fits instead of some abstract idea that’s plunked on the landscape.” Inspired by the rough tumble of rock, the lone spire of a tree, and the steep angularity of the lot, he began to design.
Agnew had another freedom that working for a specific client rarely allows. He designed the basics of the house but finalized details after it was framed. “When you go from a drawing to the real thing, there’s always something that’s a little different, so it’s a real advantage to be able to make some last-minute improvements but still keep within the budget,” he explains.
Agnew won a Su Casa/AIA Albuquerque Award of Merit for the resulting design. The house does not shout its presence or humble its more traditional neighbors. Low to the ground and close to the curb, it makes a modest but welcoming first impression. An artistic water feature points the way across a slate-tiled courtyard to the front door. Enter and the drama unfolds. A staircase to the lower level punctuates the skylit linear space while a black slate fireplace spikes to the ceiling. “I wanted those two elements, one going down and the other going up, to organize the house,” Agnew says.
“We had never thought about this style of home,” says the owner, who with her husband prefers to remain unnamed. “We lived in a very classic Santa Fe style home before. We had been looking for some time, and when we saw this, even though it was unexpected, it grew on us immediately.” She wanted light, privacy, and openness; he wanted trees, space, and his own room. Both have come to feel they found the home of their dreams.
“It’s very artistic in the way it is placed,” she says, “both in what you do see and what you don’t.” She loves the way a series of vertical windows frame a tall lone tree. “I hope that tree lives forever,” Agnew comments. Outdoor spaces of varying size encourage different activities throughout the day. One beckons for a quiet afternoon nap, for example, while another suggests a sunset glass of wine. The living room deck and master bedroom deck directly below face a forested lot the owners bought to preserve their views. The placement of windows obscures a stand of trees killed in the Cerro Grande Fire, and the garage hides a neighboring house. That detached garage ties to the main living spaces by a covered breezeway. The owners don’t find this inconvenient at all and enjoy the additional patio.
“When we entertain, we can grill out here,” she notes. “But it’s still hidden from the street. We open the front door and people can come and go all the way through to the living room deck.” Agnew says he often designs separate garages. “I’ve never understood why you drive your car into the house,” he says. “I think it should have its own place and designing that way is an opportunity to make another outdoor space.”
The house connects to its setting in ways both dramatic and subtle. The stairs to the lower level mirror the geography of the canyon outside. A basin filled with stones at the foot of the stairs reinforces the visual metaphor. On the upper level, a graceful bridge crosses the open atrium. Then there’s the pattern of light that shifts with the hours. “I tried to link everything to the way the sun moves,” Agnew explains, something the owner values. “There’s not a single part of this house that isn’t sunny during some part of the day,” she says. “Even the lower rooms that are partly below grade don’t feel closed in.” Elegant proportions also make a statement. “It’s important to break up a house into pieces that go from big to human size, which is how the landscape is,” Agnew says. “It should be so that people can walk into it and feel like they fit.”
Outdoors, a swooping roof over the living room deck expands rather than focuses the forested vista. Agnew credits the design to a former associate who liked fabricating steel. “I think it has a motion to it that’s similar to trees,” he says. “It’s a lighter scale than the rest of the house, and it gives some dynamism out toward the view.”
Agnew laid out a basic plan for the interior, and builder Stan Primak and his wife, Joan, chose the finishes that form a seamless bond with Agnew’s design intent. Interior designer Heidi Steele of IDS Santa Fe worked with the homeowners, as well. Pear wood cabinets add warmth; walls in dark green, yellow green, and tan reflect the surrounding trees; and limestone floors with embedded fossils evoke the rocky canyon.
“I am thrilled that it is so pure,” Agnew says of the home’s design. “It’s really abstract, but it hangs together, and it’s comfortable.” But perhaps there is no greater reward for Agnew or any architect than knowing those who live in their creations find joy every day.
“The house has a feeling for my husband and me,” the owner says. “When we walk in, it’s just peaceful and simple and calming. I think we’re the luckiest people.”
Award-winning journalist Marsha McEuen is a freelance writer and editor based in her hometown, Santa Fe.