Home at Last

guiding light

Pioneering designer Mary Jane Colter’s imaginative creations continue to shape the character of today’s Southwestern homes.

By Christine Mather

This article first appeared in Summer 2010 Su Casa

look inside La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe

There are Santa Fe spirits about, and I have been stalking them for years, intuitively attracted to their creations, to their past, and to trying to get in touch with them. One such dynamic soul’s legacy haunts not only me, but also pervades Santa Fe and touches millions more who view her work each year at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, the true spiritual home of Mary Jane Colter (1869–1958). Without Hopi House, the Watchtower, or Hermits Rest, the canyon experience is quite unimaginable. That she created from the ground up these buildings that appear to have been clinging to the canyon’s edge for centuries reveals just one amazing facet of her imagination. Colter had the creativity of an artist, the vision of an architect, the practical flair of a contractor, and the imagination of a unique and powerful interior designer.

Inside and outside her Grand Canyon masterpieces, you are swept into an imaginative world that looks to the past but that she invented. One of the best remaining examples of her work is Hermits Rest, which she designed as a cavelike dwelling built by a recluse. Never mind the hundreds of thousands of people tramping through each year, it maintains the romantic atmosphere of a faraway roughhewn little escape and has probably inspired countless home-grown stone fireplaces. Besides imagination, Colter focused on authenticity, knowing it was a direct path to capturing a distant reality. By creating these unique and sometimes fanciful settings, she influenced how we envision the past and how we live in the Southwest. In a career that spanned half a century, Colter helped script the texture and feel of the American West through her designs of major monuments along the railroad’s routes and its tourist detours.

Close to home in downtown Santa Fe, Colter played a vital role in revamping the La Fonda hotel when in 1926 the Fred Harvey Company hired architect John Gaw Meem to create a significant addition for the Rapp, Rapp, and Hendrickson faux adobe. Harvey needed more accommodations for its rapidly growing tourist business. In addition to designing each guest room to be unique, filling the “Grandee Suites” with real and imagined antiques, and commissioning murals, furniture, and every manner of decoration for the newly refurbished hotel, Colter found time to instruct and influence the junior Meem on his first commercial project. Perhaps roughshod is too harsh a word, but that is how she seemed to invade a project. Colter was determined that the newly redone La Fonda would not have a “gruesome” lobby. She was so successful at creating a welcoming atmosphere that overnight La Fonda became, and remained for many years, the one and only place to be in Santa Fe—the place to see and be seen, to meet, to party, and to soak up all the character the famed little city had to offer and Colter’s work helped to define.

Although the 800 pieces of furniture she had commissioned and painted for La Fonda seem, astonishingly, to have disappeared, a few major areas remain sufficiently intact so you can appreciate the welcoming, elegant, and playful atmospheres she created. For example, the lovely courtyard, La Plazuela—recently given a restorative facelift with the stripping away of ’50s peacock-blue paint and the reintroduction of a central fountain—incorporates protective portal passageways, a sheltered outdoor space inside the hotel, and the luxurious sight and sound of water. These features all continue to be important considerations for commercial structures and homes. Colter’s attention to and love of individual works of ethnic art, especially textiles (now mostly lost), light fixtures, painted walls and murals, wrought iron, and painted furniture are all aspects of her design repertoire that she reintroduced through her hotel settings—and that endure as crucial elements in the design vocabulary of the Southwest.

Her creations are largely due to not-so-crass commercialism. Hired in 1902 to decorate a part of Albuquerque’s deeply mourned Alvarado Hotel (demolished in 1970), Colter didn’t stop building and decorating until her final project in 1949—La Cantinita at La Fonda in Santa Fe. As an employee of the Fred Harvey Company, famed for bringing hospitality via the railroad to a very messy West, it was her task to design to the standards of one very persnickety business. As a perfectionist she fit right in and, further, gave the burgeoning company’s buildings the atmosphere of authenticity and glamour that attracted exactly the type of customer that would carry it forward. Bringing aboard Mary Jane Colter and promoting and respecting her vision brought the company fame, not only for fine service, but also for outstanding surroundings.

The most famous of Colter’s hotels was La Posada in Winslow, Arizona, which was intended to evoke a sprawling Mexican hacienda. Disembarking train passengers were to feel as if they had just strolled in from a hard day on the “rancho” to be pampered by the luxe atmosphere of their huge, gorgeous home—rather than having hopped off the train in the middle of nowhere. While her earlier hotel, El Navajo in Gallup, New Mexico, introduced visitors to the possibilities of decorating with Indian motifs and artifacts, La Posada was an over-the-top vision of all things Hispanic. Beautiful wrought iron, wonderful tiled floors and walls, perfect Spanish style furniture, and generous porches, balconies, walkways, and gardens all supported this sense of an elegant ranch house at the edge of the Spanish empire. It was a pure fantasy. Her influence lives on in our attention to the textures of walls and floors, our interest in incorporating the outside in, and our respect for the influence Spain has upon every element of architecture and design in the Southwest.

Colter’s signature structures still stand at the Grand Canyon, including Bright Angel Lodge, which greatly influenced the National Park Service’s rustic style. But her two immensely influential hotels for the company have suffered unhappy fates. El Navajo in Gallup—widely acknowledged as Colter’s masterpiece—was destroyed shortly before her death. (“There is such a thing as living too long,” she said.) The La Posada in Winslow, a personal favorite of hers, has survived but not without the selling off of all the interior furnishings. While most of her existing buildings now enjoy some degree of protection as registered National Historic Landmarks, her interiors have no such safeguard. These wonderful interior fantasies above all distinguish her remarkable career and have suffered most over the past century.

Although interior design is considered by some a wimpy handmaiden to the robustness of architecture, for Colter—and other truly gifted architects and designers—the interior is every bit as significant as the exterior. While the façades of historic buildings might be protected by ordinance and tradition, what goes on within in some cases could be considered a form of domestic abuse. When was the last time the preservation police came out when the curtains were changed, the ashtrays removed, the furniture repainted, or the rugs tossed out? Yet the Colters of this past design world spent as much time designing the flatware, directing the colors and textures of the curtains, and tramping on the specially designed rugs (so the home-from-the-rancho atmospherics would be perfect) as they did making sure the exterior looked hundreds of years old.

Mary Jane Colter continues to haunt me, her manifestation in the form of being mildly possessed—or is it obsessed? Each day I eat upon her “Mimbreño” designed china, gloat at my lucky score of two little shelves from La Posada, and drive by her last home, which is located in my neighborhood. As for La Fonda—also part of my daily orbit—dedication to Colter’s spirit and creativity is alive and well. There the unofficial mantra for the ongoing renovations has become, “What would Mary do?” They can hardly go wrong with such a luminary as their guide.

Christine Mather is a museum curator, as well as an author of Santa Fe Style, Santa Fe Houses, Native America, and True West, volumes that explore design and lifestyle.