su libro

Days of wine and chile Hot on the chile trail, we tour New Mexico wineries, then stop at a few small strawbale homes, check out Jill’s house, and consider Arizona’s new Southwestern homes.
By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Autumn 05 Su Casa

The House That Jill Built: A Woman’s Guide to Home Building, by Judy Ostrow, photography by Karen Leffler, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, Layton, Utah, 160 pages, 140 color photos and 20 illustrations, paper, $24.95.

I bet just off the top of my head I know a half-dozen women who have built their own homes, or a substantial portion of them. In fact, I can think of so many women who love to build, to stack adobes, slop on mud mortar with a shovel, construct bookshelves, paint rooms, sweat copper pipes, rip plywood with a Skilsaw—you get the idea—that Judy Ostrow’s The House That Jill Built seems an idea long overdue.

The book’s premise—that of course Jill can build—is persuasively demonstrated by not only the 10 women in these pages, but also by everyone’s own friends and neighbors. Not just owner-builders, either. Some of New Mexico’s most prominent and successful builders at the highest level are women. This trend, while hardly a secret, merits attention, celebration, and encouragement right down to the level of the individual, the representative “Jill” of the book’s title.

The House That Jill Built fits into that genre of house books that are at least half about people. (Oh, right, that describes Su Casa, too.) After all, a house becomes a home only when it’s occupied by us folks. The idea in this book is that if Alison Kennedy, Lizabeth Moniz, Siobhan Daggett, and the seven other women featured in these pages can build their own house, so can you. And by focusing text and images on the process as much as on the completed product, Ostrow keeps it real.

In the chapters on these 10 women, Ostrow explores every facet of building, asking each woman “where she got the idea, how she developed the skills, who helped her, what were the struggles and victories, and how she feels now.” Their stories might inspire you, scare you, or steer you into a nice house built by someone else, but along the way, they will at least entertain you.

Subsequent chapters cover pioneering women builders and a builder’s guide covering tools and techniques: what to stash in your tool bag, and when and how to use it. Ostrow also walks you through the basics of architectural drawings, building permits and other bureaucratic paperwork, and financing options. Much of this information is pretty elementary, an appropriate level for those just getting started, which is the target audience of The House That Jill Built. So if you’ve always had a hankering to build your own house but lacked the confidence—or the inspiration—buy this book, and get busy!

The New Southwest Home: Innovative Ideas for Every Room, by Suzanne Pickett Martinson, Northland Publishing, Flagstaff, AZ, 144 pages, more than 200 photographs, hardcover, $34.95.

The New Southwest Home might better be called “Phoenix Luxury Homes,” because even the precious few Santa Fe-style residences captured here bear the stamp of Arizona design sensibility, from the architecture to the interiors. That just goes to show that as a design expression, Southwestern style varies considerably from state to state—and even within states—across the region, loosely defined as the belt from California to Texas and a sliver of Utah, maybe Nevada, and wide swaths of Colorado.

Every place has its own look, though architectural innovations and style fads flow among them like phrases swapped by soloing jazz musicians. When I’m in Tucson or Phoenix, I often ponder the occasional New Mexico-style homes, hoping to tease out the design strands that are local departures from what we consider authentic vernacular developed over hundreds of years over here. You can spot the Arizona difference in the treatment of lintels over windows, the stucco color, the squared-off parapets, the high-shine vigas, and the cowboy kitsch inside—nothing absolute, maybe, just a general impression of variation from what you’d see down Guadalupe Trail in Albuquerque.

Then comes the ironic whiplash when I drive through a new Albuquerque neighborhood and see a string of these Arizona interpretations of New Mexico architecture in a kind of reverse, reconstituted cultural imperialism: Scottsdale East has leapfrogged 400 miles of mountains and desert to land in 300-year-old Albuquerque.

With its photos culled from the pages of Phoenix Home & Garden, the grand dame of Southwestern homes magazines, The New Southwest Home can certainly claim to represent the state of the art of residential architecture, interior design, and building in our sister state to the west. The book is logically organized into chapters about the major subdivisions of a house: the public spaces of entry, living and family rooms, and kitchen, then the private zones of “sleeping rooms,” baths, and more specialized spaces like wine rooms and libraries. Brief chapter introductions set the stage for each zone, then captions and bits of wisdom from local interior designers interpret the lavish photos.

In fact, those designers’ statements clarify the scope of The New Southwest Home: it’s about design, decor, and accessories, an idea book and visual stimulant, not particularly an architectural resource, though plenty of Arizona architecture is on display. But maybe the light treatment of actual home design is a good thing, as so much of this lux-home architecture seems less grounded in regional expression of place than in conspicuous flaunting of cavernous volumes shaped by a checklist of in vogue design features (rotundas, arches, radii…). You could almost get the feeling that Arizona lacks a vernacular design tradition connecting its residents to the local cultural roots—those roots that distinguish a community from a subdivision, a home from a house.

Actually, what Arizona lacks is a John Gaw Meem, a towering, seminal architect who capitalized on New Mexico’s vibrant, native building tradition—but that’s another story, with its own ironies and inauthenticities. The downside of the New Mexico fetish of Pueblo Revival, Territorial Revival, and Santa Fe-ism is the absence of a coherent post-Meem architectural movement grounded in regionalism but accommodating the spacious room scale, surfaces, textures, appointments, and accessories of the modern luxury home. I mean, come on! Meem hit his creative peak before the United States entered World War II. Most of New Mexico’s leading architects in recent years have explored design vocabularies radically different from Meem’s historically minded revivalisms, working more with organic shapes, or the glass, steel, and concrete of modernism.

As a result, New Mexico home builders have looked afield—to Arizona, to Tuscany!—for design inspiration and cues on how to create high-end, high-impact houses. The days of the modest yet sprawling, low-to-the-ground hacienda seem to be over.

Arizona, with its mastery of Venetian plasters, stone, refined wood, lots of glass and multiple floor levels, integrated with traditional references—often New Mexican vigas and corbels, latilla ceilings, kiva fireplaces—suggests a direction at once mainstream American in its love of surface, but also regionally attuned. No wonder an Albuquerque builder can boast of a Scottsdale house or “Old World elegance.”

So The New Southwest Home delivers up page after page of ideas large and small that can be grafted onto a Santa Fe-style or Pueblo style house without losing the regional touch but satisfying the urge to improve upon the neighbors’ “little mud hut.” Hey, it’s your thing! Do what you wanna do.

Small Strawbale, Natural Homes Projects & Designs, by Bill Steen, Athena Swentzell Steen, and Wayne Bingham, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, Layton, Utah, 125 photographs, 50 line drawings, 20 floor plans, paper, $29.95.

Strawbale building advocates Bill Steen and Athena Swentzell Steen have teamed up with architect Wayne Bingham to create this attractive book that’s part inspiration, part design resources, part “notes from the alt-building underground,” and—like every strawbale book I’ve yet seen—part change-the-world-at-home manifesto. Keep ’em comin’!

One of these days, Su Casa will feature a home by the Steens, even if it is in Arizona. They do nice work. Till then, their books must satisfy our desire to appreciate that work—and that of others. In Small Strawbale, you’ll find a wide range of intriguing homes, sheds, garden walls, meditation rooms, and the like by people in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Australia, even Scotland.

The most simplistic measure of a home book’s worth comes from answering one test question: does it feature one or more houses I’d like for my own? In the case of Small Strawbale, the question returns a strong “yes!” The more I look at Small Strawbale, the more I like it, for its variety, richness of ideas, range of expression, and its orderly integration of owner anecdotes with informative (if sketchy) explanations of technique and design along with Bingham’s floor plans.

For mainstreamers or even forward-leaning dabblers in alternative construction methods, much strawbale architecture and design tumbles off the edge of creative vernacular into nonsensical whimsy. Without rigor, rhyme, or reason beyond spontaneous self-expression—great in “free jazz” but tiring in home design—free-form architecture often has an audience of just one, its creator.

Fortunately, from overall design to style to finish details, this book delivers figurative tons of material ready to be exploited by both conventional and experimental builders, homeowners, remodelers, architects, and designers. Most of the homes and structures in Small Strawbale achieve a charming balance between creative individuality and thoughtful refinement, without stumbling into baffling idiosyncrasy. For instance, the Steens’ cottage in Arizona is a lovely, minimalist, 72-square-foot microspace. What an office it would make! With its steeply gabled roof, straw-flecked exterior plaster, and corrugated metal shed-roof porch, the cottage could blend into any New Mexican village north of Interstate 40. But it’s the interior finishing that sets this hut apart: a stunning ceiling of bamboo rods over the loft, a reed mat ceiling capping the alcove below; a purple wall plastered with lime and colored by casein paint adjacent to highly burnished clay plaster wall surfaces. It’s like Steve Martin said about banjo playing: who could remain unhappy here?

It’s worth noting that building and design professionals have not reached consensus on the efficacy of strawbale construction. Many builders and architects remain unconvinced because they question its durability around moisture, its hospitality to unwanted insects, and even the sometimes high embodied energy it represents when bales are trucked long distances to a construction site. The Steens and Bingham are obviously persuaded of its virtues, however, and their investment of time, energy, and fieldwork suggest it is a construction method with considerable merit.

The appeal of Small Strawbale, though, is independent of its focus on straw-built homes. Many of the design elements are appropriate for any stuccoed Southwest style home, and the plaster and clay finishes, the amazing carved and frescoed stucco and plaster, the extensive use of natural and local materials like stone, bamboo, reed mats, recycled bottles (in lieu of glass block), and the like can be adapted to many different styles of home. The Steens and Bingham are also strong proponents of a do-it-yourself approach that empowers people to take their shelter into their own hands, a low-tech, self-propelled approach that means “the doors of participation are left open for the process to be graced with heart and soul.” Amen.

The Wines of New Mexico, by Andy Sandersier, foreword by Esteban A. Herrera, University of New Mexico Press, 73 black and white images, 34 maps, 125 pages, paper, $19.95.
On the Chile Trail: 100 Great Recipes from Across America, by Coyote Joe, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, Layton, Utah, 160 pages, paper, $24.95.

I’ll confess to a deep and far-reaching ignorance concerning wine. I stumble through its language, trip on the distinctions among its types, and most often shop it by price. Nonetheless, I respect wine making and am intrigued by the intellectual milieu that surrounds it. Paradoxically, it’s a liquid consumable collectible. Sure wine has an obvious and oft-noted snob factor among certain connoisseurs. Status accrues to those who possess arcane knowledge about grape varieties, rare vintages from obscure or prestigious wineries, and the abstracted vocabulary employed to describe the subtleties of scent and taste. Still, wine, like any great hobby, can broaden our understanding of the world by providing—paradoxically—a tightly focused channel of inquiry and exploration. For instance, touring vineyards is a great pretext for a road trip—or a movie!—into not just the geography of grape growing, but its history and the culture within which this elite form of agriculture continues to evolve.

The Wines of New Mexico make clear that here, as probably anywhere, you can’t study the grape without studying the place. It’s that simple. You’ll be amazed. Consider this: in 1629, Franciscan friars defied the Spanish law prohibiting the growing of grapes for wine in the New World. The friars planted a vineyard near San Antonio, “establishing New Mexico as the oldest wine-making region in the country,” Sandersier reports. Though wine making remains something of a boutique industry here, Sandersier asserts that the low rainfall and hot summers with cool nights in areas around 5,000 feet elevation in New Mexico create an ideal climate for grape production. And we’ve got the vino to prove it, with taste that compares with “not only the finer wines of California, but even with those of higher-priced imports from France, Germany, and Italy.”

Testing this bold claim just might require more than one outing down the highways and rural byways of New Mexico, from the northwest to the valleys of the north-central mountains, from the middle to the southern Rio Grande valley and outside the central mountain-valley chain to places like Deming.

For each of the three major zones in this book—southern, central, and northern—Sandersier provides an overview map, a list of wineries, and the distances to major New Mexico towns. He also gives a narrative overview of the vicinities within each region, then proceeds to a user-friendly two-page spread on each vineyard or winery. Several paragraphs talk about the winery, its proprietors, its varieties of grapes and types of wine, and whatever tidbits—anecdotal, historical, or tangential—round out the story. On the facing page, a map and at-a-glance details about the winery sum up the pertinent facts. These include acres in production, the hours of wine tasting, grape varietals and wine types, retail outlets for buying the wine, contact information, even the nearest lodgings. A black and white reproduction of the label should help visual recognition in the store—and some of these labels are fine art themselves, epitomized by Amado Peña’s amazing labels for Santa Fe Vineyards (actually near Española, New Mexico).

All in all, it’s a fine guidebook, one probably long overdue among aficionados of the grape. Even if you don’t subscribe to Wine Spectator magazine, The Wines of New Mexico might expose you to a heretofore unsuspected facet of this surprising state. Now, how about a guidebook to chile growers, apple growers, horse farms…?

Speaking of chile, On the Chile Trail is a metaphoric guidebook to the culinary strategies for preparing our favorite pepper—but wait, it’s not a pepper at all! And that’s not all you’ll learn from Tucson chile authority Coyote Joe. But first, don’t pick up On the Chile Trail when you lack immediate access to a bushel of Sandia hot or Anaheim green chiles. You’ll go loco with craving. On the occasions when I’ve spent several months away from New Mexico, it’s the remembered sweet sting of fresh-roasted green chile that transformed homesickness into hunger pangs.

Of course, we New Mexicans think we invented the chile and all foods incorporating it. Wrong, and wrong again (but isn’t it pretty to think so?). Never mind, Coyote Joe will set you straight, as he draws recipes, history, and background commentary for chile-based cuisine from Louisiana Cajun country, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, the so-called Chile Belt.

Make no mistake, this is a real cookbook. You won’t be opening any cans or bottles if you follow these recipes (except maybe a bottle of Tabasco or Cholula’s hot sauce). Coyote Joe calls for fresh ingredients, on the spot roasting of chiles, and creating your own stocks, sauces, and the like. I got excited to try the grill-roasted poblano corn chowder (cream, corn, green chile—come on!), the spicy sage and beer brined pork loin (give pork a chance!), and of course Arizona’s chipotle and cheddar mashed potatoes with roasted garlic (chipotle makes everything better!).

So if you’re a little bored with your own green chile cheese enchiladas, light out for the territories on the Chile Trail with Coyote Joe. You know you can’t miss—it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that capsaicin.

Good House, Cheap House: Adventures in Creating an Extraordinary Home at an Everyday Pricea, by Kira Obolensky, The Taunton Press, Newtown, CT, 192 pages, 240 color photographs, 20 black and white drawings, hardcover, $32.

The ongoing flow of books about small houses, affordable houses, green houses, owner-builts, prefabs, and otherwise unique but not monumental homes must surely be an indicator of an intensifying trend toward individuality in the housing market. Apparently, some not inconsequential segment of the buying public has a strong appetite for unique dwellings at middlin’ prices.

Maybe that hunger comes from our steady diet of metaphorical junk food—everything we touch seems to have been mass-produced. Many among us crave a lovely, unique home. We want it to express and reinforce not status but our best vision of ourselves. Home is an especially important environment that influences our physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being. It better be nice!

So why shouldn’t everyone have a great house? Author Kira Obolensky argues that money is not the issue. “In this book, the good cheap house distinguishes itself from just cheap through design, experimentation, and ingenuity, all of which can transform an inexpensive structure into one that has value and worth.” In fact, she suggests that the problem-solving sparked by holding down costs actually inspires good design: “Budget,” she writes, “is the muse of the good cheap house.”

Obolensky, who co-wrote the nationally best-selling and trend-setting book The Not So Big House with Sarah Susanka, knows good design. She evidently knows more than a few architects, as well. Of the 27 residences in Good House Cheap House, about half are architects’ own homes, designed by themselves and marked by experimentation and “deeply personal” originality. Obolensky writes that in most cases, “using an architect is what has transformed a house from one that is cheap to one that is unique.” Her bias extends to using professional contractor/builders, too, and she even extols the virtues of architect-designed prefab houses. These have yet to make a big splash in the New Mexico market but offer the potential for good value in thoughtful, if not unique, design.

So much for the book’s philosophy, which Obolensky lays out in a few concise, well-written introductory pages. Most people will buy Good House Cheap House for the portfolios section. It includes photo spreads on two dozen-plus houses ranging from a neo-New Mexican home in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque to a recently renovated Minnesota cottage clad in corrugated sheet metal (and remodeled for $50 a square foot while doubling the usable square footage). For each home, Obolensky parses the details of design and construction that make it, ahem, good and cheap. She also gives the per-square-foot cost of the home.

For her own remodel, Obolensky salvaged “acres” of chalk boards, then installed them as the kitchen backsplash, so you know she knows the art of creative scrounging firsthand. One couple bought a lot with a teardown on it. Rather than paying for demolition, they invited the local fire department to burn the junker down, saving money and giving the local firefighters practice extinguishing residential fires. Wow.

In another house, a staircase mixes steel risers and walnut treads, allowing the homeowners to save money while aesthetically splurging on hybridized traditional/industrial style. A Tennessee house wears unfinished yellow pine on its walls—no paint, and it’s easier and cheaper to install than typical drywall. Looks warm and cozy. A third homeowner used affordable Fireslate—think Chem. Lab 101—rather than pricier stone options.

And so it goes. For each house, Obolensky chunks the information into a narrative about the homeowners and their goals and ambitions for their home, plus a section on design elements, sometimes a section on materials, and sometimes an “out of the box” sidebar about an unusual feature of the home, like the inexpensive fabricated steel mask over a plain enamel fridge. Often, just such application of common, inexpensive materials in a new way creates a surprising design flourish—it’s the architectural equivalent of music sampling, and it injects humor, self-expression, and creativity without ratcheting up the cost.

That’s what it’s all about in Good House Cheap House. And because everyone I know, or even know of, works within a budget, this book should find lots of readers. It deserves the attention.