hasta la vista
casual perfection

One room at a time, Richard Nelson and family transform a simple mountain adobe into a stealth charmer reflecting nearly four decades of passion, artistry, and design flair.

By Charles C. Poling Photograph by Jack Parsons

This article first appeared in Summer 2009 Su Casa

Short on money, no longer on friendly speaking terms with his local draft board, and fresh from a stint living in author James Thurber’s cabin in upstate New York, in 1970 Richard Nelson and his wife of the time, Michael, needed a place to live. Preferably way, way off the beaten path. Through friends who sought a caretaker, they found themselves moving into a decrepit little adobe in the high, remote hamlet of Llano, New Mexico.

Richard admits the house was rough: no running water, no phone. Electricity ran through a jury-rigged extension cord stretched from the nearest power pole. Plaster hung off the walls, the roof sagged, insulating dirt sifted from the attic onto the rooms below. Once a crack like a rifle shot startled Richard into action: a viga had snapped under the weight of that dirt. He dashed up the rickety steps to the attic with a shovel to spread out the load. Someday that dirt would have to go.

Most people would have moved out after the first snowfall. At around 8,000 feet, the elevation added yet another challenge in wintertime. But Richard—a doer who seems to express himself best with his hands—had skills, determination, and motivation to live a life different from the way of mainstream America. Whether he knew it or not, Richard had found his magnum opus. Calling it a remodeling project misses the point entirely. This was lifestyle as art. Over the next 39 years, sometimes one room at a time, Richard and Michael, then Richard and his current wife of 19 years, Donna, conjured a unique showplace of personal adobe style. They did it with help from the kids and local tradesmen, with bartered materials, with a design flair reflecting Richard’s professional background in architecture and Donna’s intuitive interior design sense. They did it with his ability to handle tools. And they did it with time out to raise kids and farm the fields and trade Richard’s own labor to others for various goods and services.

The isolation of Llano suited him just fine. A meadowy place with acequias and streams rushing by, Llano perches on a shoulder of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains up-canyon from Peñasco and Picurís Pueblo. An out-of-service school, church, and general store suggest a once more-bustling village. The farther views around Nelson’s place yield broad cattle pastures, forested ridges, distant peaks. Back in the early 1970s, the road past the house took hippies back and forth to the Hog Farm, one of New Mexico’s more illustrious communes. The Grateful Dead stopped by there. Other notable musicians came through. The year before, Wavy Gravy had loaded a bus with hippies and headed to Woodstock where they provided security for the music festival. Kind of.

Back in those days, this part of the world remained not just pre-industrial, pre-Internet, and pre-satellite dish TV—it was practically pre-cash economy, too. The Pueblo people had occupied the valley for generations on generations, and Hispanic settlers had long since staked out farms and grazing lands around Peñasco. Both groups were now making room for the first large wave of Anglo immigration.

Some were hippies. Some were simply drawn to the notion of a fresh start while the rest of America seemed to be falling apart socially, politically, economically. After graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in architecture, Richard worked for Paolo Soleri in Arizona, then after a brief interlude working in San Francisco, he took a position with a large architectural firm in New York City. “I couldn’t relate to this monster firm,” he recalls. “I met an old college buddy who talked us into dropping out of the whole scene. So we went up to the Thurber cabin at least for the summer.” At one point, he was cutting ice out of the nearby pond. “I tried everything,” he says. After a year living in the cabin, reading mystic authors like Gurdjieff, with the military draft closing in on him, “we knew we had to get out.” The couple gave away most of their clothes and other belongings and flew to New Mexico.

Once in Llano, Richard and Michael saw a chance to make a home with little cash. A couple years after moving in as caretakers, they bought the little adobe with a tad more than seven irrigated acres for $6,000, scrounging the dough by cashing in an insurance policy.

from the bottom up
Now the real caretaking began.

The main house has the L shape and pitched roof of the archetypal northern New Mexico mountain village adobe. Richard figures the first two rooms—now the kitchen and living room—were built about 1923. Sometime later, two more rooms were added perpendicularly to form the L, perhaps as in-law quarters since they lacked a connecting passage into the original rooms. One of Richard’s first jobs—punching a doorway between the two wings—created internal flow from room to room. Many structural and functional changes followed in a bewildering narrative of home makeover, something that seems much more elaborate and organic than the word remodeling conveys. To simplify: the early years saw Richard shoring up the home and making it inhabitable, functional, useful. Then over the past two decades, Richard and Donna have done most of the aesthetic improvements to the 1,600-square-foot house. Two years ago they put up the bright tin roof, which fits the vibe of village houses around the north, and renovated a small outbuilding as a cozy and exquisite guest cottage with a bathroom, fireplace, and galley kitchen.

Complementing Richard’s architectural and construction abilities, Donna’s tastes, sensibility, and penchant for antiques bring a satisfying depth of interior design to this faraway place, from wall colors to cabinetry to the furniture and decor.

That early structural work involved considerable rehabilitation. As in most old adobes, the walls hunkered down on a foundation of mud and rock. Richard shored that up with concrete, then had a worker add buttresses to the corners. He also redid the floors, some in wood, others in brick. In the living room, for instance, the floor had been rough inch-wide boards laid on poles set on sand. Richard tore that out and set a new brick surface.

Along the way, Richard shuffled around the functions of various rooms. What’s now the kitchen was once a bedroom—a birthing room, in fact, for Richard’s first two children. He delivered them himself. At that time, he and Michael were sleeping outside on the porch, preparing meals on a cookstove inside, and washing up in a pail for a sink. Later, Richard set up a temporary kitchen at the other end of the house, where the bathroom sits now, and used the current kitchen as a workshop. Another time he added a south greenhouse to the long end of the L (with an elegant tiled shower) and an east-facing greenhouse to the short end by the dining table.

a little less perfect
Between them, the couple has four children, all grown and gone except Magnus, just finishing at Taos High School. Johannah and Amos are Richard’s from his first marriage; Melina is Donna’s daughter from a previous marriage. The impending birth of Richard and Donna’s son Magnus 18 years ago inspired another round of major remodeling. For this months-long project, Richard and Donna moved into the guest house and washed dishes in a tub in the orchard, even as winter descended and the natal deadline approached. “We were plastering till one month before Magnus was born,” Richard recalls.

During that multiseason project, the Nelsons moved the “temporary” kitchen (10 years in service) out of the southwest wing of the L and replaced it with the bathroom/laundry. Richard built cabinets, bookshelves, doors, and windows. He sandblasted the vigas and decking in the living room and new kitchen, replaced ceiling boards and beams where needed, added molding trim around doors and windows, and so on. They lifted the roof and added a staircase out of the kitchen to reach a new bedroom for Richard and Donna. (It never ends: more recently, they raised the roof for Magnus’ upstairs bedroom, now that he stands six feet three inches tall.)

The evolution of the upstairs encapsulates the roundabout development of the house at large. Original owners had followed local tradition and insulated the attic with that aforementioned 12-inch layer of dirt resting on pine needles and branches above the decking of the downstairs ceiling. At first, Richard scraped aside the dirt and laid tar-paper, then restored the dirt. That solved the sifting of powdery soil onto occupants below, but after the viga cracked, Richard eventually shoveled it all out and built “mini rooms” upstairs. Headroom was a problem.

“Donna thought I was crazy,” he says now as Donna wags her head in laughing agreement.

“You could barely stand up in the middle” of the pitched ceiling upstairs, she says. “All the doors and cabinets were miniature, everything!”

So Richard raised the roof. Happily, their room retains its dollhouse quality. It’s almost like being on a ship.

Interior walls wear all-natural mud plaster covered with oil-based paints, the color varying from room to room, the boldest hue being a vibrant brick red in the kitchen. Richard used to periodically replaster the exterior walls with mud, but that became a maintenance headache so he and Donna had it stuccoed. Richard hasn’t settled on a color coat yet: “I don’t want anything too commercial looking. It needs to look more uneven”—more like the old mud plaster, probably.

“We’re really fussy about things,” Donna adds.

While the home’s provenance, the history of its renovation, might suggest a certain homespun roughness, nothing could be further from the truth. Other than the gray scratch coat outside, the whole place gleams with careful but not overly precious craftsmanship, from the neat carpentry on cabinets, trim molding, and staircases to the deep beveled window frames and lovely wall plaster in the kitchen. Most of the carpentry was done by Richard’s hand, though his son Amos did the majority of the upstairs. “He does everything perfectly,” Richard says, “but I like things a little less perfect”—it suits the famous inexactitude of adobe design.

Solar heat, a gas heater in the kitchen, another in the back den, and a corner fireplace in the living room heat the home. The thick adobe walls hold in the heat and, at 8,000 feet of elevation, nature provides the summertime cooling.

trading places
In conversation with Richard and Donna, it quickly becomes clear that Richard gets things done with his hands. It’s also clear that trade and barter have figured larger than cash and borrow when it came to working on the house.

“Everything was based on the barter system in the old days,” Donna recalls. “We were willing to live with less and enjoy the fruits of our labor. You have to understand that Richard requires very little to live on. He’s not part of the material world.”

Richard’s career in those early years rarely involved what might be called a day job. He worked as carpenter on movie sets. He built massage tables. He went to Berkeley, California, for awhile and made toys at a co-op workshop in Oakland—rideable rams on wheels, stick horses with opening jaws. Back in New Mexico he sold toys at the Santa Fe Fiesta and traveled to toy fairs to widen his market. At home in Llano, he gardened, he watched the kids, he traded work for things he needed. Case in point, he once traded his handmade wooden toys for dental surgery. Later when he needed his wisdom teeth removed, he traded carpentry in a walk-in closet to the same dentist. If his daughter, Johannah, needed jeans, he traded toys at the store.

In its heyday, the Nelson place was a functioning farm, producing hay, beans, peas, corn, pumpkins, Swiss chard, broccoli, cabbage, plums, apples, fruit leather, goat milk, eggs, and so on. The Nelsons would barter hay they cut in their field for firewood, veggies from their prodigiously productive garden for groceries in Taos.

“Our vegetable garden could feed the whole community,” Donna says, and Richard adds, “It’s because I was here, I could do the work. I’d work in the shop [an outbuilding next to the guest house], do a little business, watch Mags and Meli, work on the farm.” In fact, neighborhood kids added to the menagerie, even coming for breakfast sometimes.

a new day
Eventually the farming became too much. Richard now works part time for a home design center in Taos. Donna works at a mortgage company. With her sister Melissa she opened an antiques consignment store and interior design/decor business on the side in Taos called Antiques at the Bunkhouse, satisfying her passion for interior design.

“I had been doing mortgages, then I turned 50, and I said if I don’t do what I really want to do now, I probably never will,” she says. Having grown up with a mother who traded in antiques in Massachusetts, the business was a natural creative step for Donna. Her work can be seen throughout the house, which features an eclectic mix of furnishings accumulated over many years, almost all of it old though it never feels like a themed display.

“When I decorate someone’s house, I see a whole thing. The house dictates that,” she says. “This house told me what it wanted: it was built in 1923. It always dictated an Arts and Crafts look. It still has that flavor—beadboard in the bathroom, the colors of the furniture, that gorgeous bookcase Richard built in the middle room. Everything looks like it has been here a long time.” Even the commercial-grade black Wolf stove in the kitchen maintains the period atmosphere.

Inside and out, the place bears the deep imprint of its occupants: everywhere you look on the property, they’ve touched it, improved it, honed it to a casual perfection that reveals the thoughtful care bestowed it. Beyond the property line, a few neighbors’ houses intercept the sight line, then it’s meadows and forests and mountains, cattle grazing an almost classically bucolic scene of time-out-of-mind tranquility.

“It’s like being in heaven up here,” Donna says.

Yet now that their youngest child is headed off to college, the couple sees a change on their horizon—a move into Taos, perhaps, closer to work and business, a place without the endless workload of an old house on a small mountain farm. Richard is designing a new house in his head. This place that once hummed with kids coming and going—where farm work set the summer schedule and a magic bus bounced by on the road to Woodstock—must seem mighty quiet these days. Maybe the old days are over and it’s time for some new ones.