time on their side
In the shadow of Black Mesa, a northern New Mexico homeowner and a craftsman-builder take their own sweet time restoring an adobe housedating from the 1800s.
The pervasive and sacred presence of Black Mesa figures largely in the setting of Migué Dozier’s home in northern New Mexico.
Builder Don Hunter spent 11 months hand-troweling three coats of plaster on the interior walls in this “Slow Food” house.
Refinished vigas and new custom cabinetry update the home while preserving its there-forever atmosphere. The mud floor, with dirt hauled from Abiquiú, took a month to dry. Because it scratches easily, the dogs stay outside.
This article first appeared in Winter 09 Su Casa
web-exclusive photos
When I’d see Migué Dozier, my neighbor in La Puebla, New Mexico, and ask how his house was coming along, he’d say “good” and laugh. I knew that Migué was remodeling a house once owned by his uncle. This went on for years, and recently I heard he is living in the house and that it is a jewel.
An esteemed medical doctor who has practiced locally in ERs and clinics, Migué comes from an interesting and talented Santa Clara Pueblo family—his father, Edward Dozier, was a well-known Native American anthropologist and linguist who worked most of his life studying Native Americans and the peoples of northern Luzon, Philippines. Migué’s house is set against the breathtaking landscape of the Rio Grande south of Española by Black Mesa and Santa Clara and San Ildefonso pueblo lands. The river is a stroll away, a sister lives nearby, and you can take a breath and inhale ancient New Mexico.
Although Migué has already moved in, his home’s exterior is still a gray scratch coat of plaster, which does not bother him in the least. When I inquire when he might apply the final color coat, he says we’d have to wait quite a while to see it done; he is in no big rush. This indeed has been the flow of the entire project. He calls this the Slow Food approach to building.
Slow Food, an antidote to McAnything, advocates cooking with local ingredients and most definitely from scratch. Think Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Think foodies, think put on some music, go out and pull some carrots and chard, and make any day stretch into dinner gracefully. The results are a satisfying meal, from growing to preparation to cooking to dining by candles. Apply these concepts to building, and you maybe can glimpse the why of this home. Six years of work by builder Don Hunter, with a hand from Migué early on and subcontractors for plumbing and electric, result in a home that is like a large piece of furniture, carefully joined and finely finished.
When Don, my neighbor in La Puebla who lives down the road from Migué’s previous home, heard through a mutual friend that Migué was planning to restore a house, the mystique and pull of the adobes called. Don has a background in general framing and trim carpentry and is also known as the Furniture Doctor, the name of a business in antique restoration and furniture repair he ran with his ex-wife for 10 years in Santa Fe. Before that he claims that he spent the last half of the 1970s in a secret monastery. Don is a bit of a trickster and admits that this is “kind of true, but sounds good. The more people know details, the more they hammer you into place, and maybe you don’t want to be in that place.” The hammer image seems an ironic one for a man who has worked six years solo on one project, a sort of monk of his trade. When Don started on the Dozier home, the walls were coming apart with gaping cracks, and the house had several small rooms and barely a roof. Sounds like fun, right?
The original house was built by a Hispanic family in the late 1800s with Douglas fir vigas and split cedar and dirt for the flat roof. Around World War I the pitched hip roof was added after bringing the adobe up three feet above the vigas. This was also when the one and only bedroom was added. The Dozier family acquired the house and land in the early 1930s. They rented out the place for years without making improvements, so when Migué took on the project, he faced tenuous plumbing in a near ruin of an adobe in a stunning location.
Don began with demolition. Joined a bit by Migué in the early demo stages, they gutted the house to one big room and made decisions as needed, staying a step or two ahead of construction. Don says sometimes they would confab daily, and other times it would be three months between building conversations. For the first four years Don spent winters in Arizona to avoid the cold. One of the appeals of this job was that from the get-go, they agreed there would be no timetable.
I am married to a construction guy, and in this business it’s always about time and getting things done yesterday. Indeed, this sense of time intrigues me more than the size of the home’s window openings. I think these men invented taking your own sweet time and to very sweet ends, a house of gemlike polish and shine. It was a way for Migué to build on a pay-as-you-go basis, and it suited Don’s temperament perfectly. The house cannot be sold to people outside of the pueblo, so Migué did not approach the project with the usual investment mentality. He was relaxed and in a slow New Mexican flow—beauty and doing things right counted for much more than time frame.
Don’s initial big push for the home was to make it stable, and five years after interior plastering, he reports no cracks of any size, even on walls that were “way whacked.” That proves the stability he was after. The walls are hand-troweled Structo-Lite in three coats. When I dare ask how long he spent on that job, Don replies, “I was plastering for 11 months.” He worked alone, mixing, cleaning up. The ceiling itself, 16 feet at the peak, became a major task, requiring him to set up scaffolding over the vigas. He left seam markings on the wall to show a day’s work, another intentional nod to time. Then again Don adds, “My eight-hour days are six hours.” One of the advantages of working by himself is making his own quirky schedule. Besides that, Don adds, “I don’t like regular infusions of other people’s life stories.”
The entire house, including laundry rooms, is roughly 1,200 square feet. Notably modern touches include the sparkly red composite kitchen counters (a nice counterpoint to the earthen tones elsewhere), computer corner, and new plumbing and electric that result in a cozy and easy place to live.
The home’s one bedroom has new wood floors and a lovely and complex 45-degree-angled hip roof, one half of an octagon. The house echoes this proportion in several places—a doorway, an end wall—and you can also see it in the Santa Niño Church on Route 76 out of Española. One and a half baths meet the owner’s needs. The full bath has a shower with a radiant heat floor and a bathtub. Over the tub, stained glass by Los Alamos artist Fran Stovall celebrates Black Mesa’s glory. A pervasive and sacred feature of the landscape, the mesa’s outer beauty seeps inside.
I admire the refinished vigas, even the ones that were burned as woodstoves over the years started to scorch the interior, at which time the rental’s occupant would simply move the stove to a new spot. The current safely installed stove went into early planning; Don prepared a tiled area around the wood burner when he worked on the mud floor.
The floor itself has a timeless quality though it rests on radiant heat. Don took a class with adobe aficionado Quentin Wilson at Northern New Mexico College in El Rito to learn mud floors. Don’s finish treatment is a mix of two full coats of two parts boiled linseed with one part spar varnish lightly thinned with mineral spirits. The floor, made of Abiquiú mud, took an entire month to dry, and Don filled the inevitable cracks with an intentionally darker stain, troweling several times to finish them. The results look like stone with grouted joints, reinforcing the sense of a practical, elegant, and historically representative home that both builder and homeowner sought. Because the floor is tender and dogs can’t retract their claws, they live outside.
During deconstruction, Don carefully saved all of the home’s native pine floor boards. For him the most fun part of the project was to use these later, sanded and sealed, for panels of cabinets, face plates, built-in bookshelves, and the end of the bathtub.
Now the house is down to finishing touches—a ladder to the loft and that exterior coat. Don is researching stable exterior earthen clay plaster. At the project’s finale, he admits feeling “baffled” as to where his work life will lead him. For future projects he says it is “very important that the mood of the job be pleasant and straightforward.” At 61, Don realizes he might be too old to approach another job of this scale in the same manner. “I would need a crew and a client of harmonious beings. Otherwise, not interested.” His interest in clay plaster may be the new direction to express his careful craftsmanship.
This slow house flips time, the imperative of most construction projects, on its head. This agreement of owner and builder is a rare match, and both parties are happy with the outcome. Don calls this house his “magnum opus” and is certain that in the time he spent remodeling, three houses could be built from scratch. It is a once-in-a-lifetime effort for both Don Hunter and Migué Dozier. How often does the Furniture Doctor meet the medical doctor? This collaboration has created a timeless home of wholeness, beauty, and mutual glowing pride.