Inside su casa
a little dream of home

By Charles C. Poling Photograph by Jack Parsons

This article first appeared in Summer 2009 Su Casa

Over the years photographing homes for Su Casa, we’ve seen all manner of kitchens. Often they seem to focus on the pride and aspirations of the homeowners. Sometimes that’s because they are serious cooks and take great pleasure in setting up a workplace to support food preparation and cleanup as seamlessly and effortlessly as possible. Other times the kitchen announces domestic achievement and socioeconomic arrival.

Arrival might be a key word for describing the room. In older country homes, most visitors enter through the kitchen door, coming into the true “family room.” In such homes, old and new, all the action centers on the kitchen: slicing and dicing, sure, frying and roasting, absolutely, brewing and baking, you bet. But also homework and laptop Internet surfing, long calls on the phone (corded, cordless, or cell), planning vacations, dreaming of future home improvements . . . all happen in the kitchen, often as not.

When we arrived at our kitchen-themed summer issue, we took a broad view of the topic, with tips from Vishu Magee (Style with Substance, page 38) on designing a kitchen, great glassware finds by Julie Dean in Finding Keepers (page 18), and a brace of books that consider kitchens as projects and as social history in Su Libro (page 85).

At Steven Levine and Marci Blaze-Levine’s adobe home, remodeled from head to toe by Bonifacio Gurule of Corrales Builders, the greatly expanded kitchen, visible in long sight lines from the entry hallway and living room, beckons to visitors with its soft light and warm tones. Decked out with killer cabinetry and state-of-the-art yet modestly concealed appliances, it gains livability through its spacious floor plan, the broad island and easy-sitting bar stools, and the deep windows and high wood ceilings that characterize a classic adobe oozing with unforced style.

In fact, the design vocabulary of Santa Fe style echoes throughout this Corrales, New Mexico, home, a strong reminder that the style’s roots came from all over New Mexico and in fact found high expression long ago in the Albuquerque area. For pure Santa Fe, though, we offer Lucinda Hoyt’s unique compound in the Canyon Road area. An artist, she makes intriguing shadow boxes containing provocatively juxtaposed objects: funny, that’s exactly how one might describe her house. As a typical adobe filled with art and category-defying miscellanea, her place could only be found in Santa Fe, yet it sidesteps every cliché of the genre.

In this issue you’ll also find coverage of the annual Custom Builders Council Home Tour. We moved it from our Spring II issue to Summer when we reduced our frequency from five issues per year to four. The tour offers you a chance to get inside nine remarkable and remarkably diverse custom homes, where you can chat up the builders, inspect their work, and dream a little dream of home. You just might want to start with the kitchen.