the waiting room
Big dreams and city desks pave the way to a lovingly designed Santa Fe home addition.
This charming enclosed portal at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe inspires Christine Mather's highly anticipated dream room.
Selected Home at Last articles:
On the Street Where I Live
Our Blue Heaven
A Dreamy Little Home
Person to Person
Santa Fe is involved in its own urban version of Extreme Makeover Home Edition in an all-out spiff-it-up campaign that involves not only the famed Railyard but also extensive fix-it and build-it action right off the plaza. I, too, have felt the urge for something new and glamorous on the home front, so my husband and I have charged off into the wacky world of adding on to our home.
Our desire to join in this building mode is a bit surprising considering that our wee gallery, affectionately known by Dave as his mouse hole, lies at the epicenter of the construction action tucked among three major projects—the New Mexico History Museum, the new Santa Fe Convention Center, and the total renovation of the La Esquina building. At one point this past year, we could gaze out at three large cranes all doing their cranely thing in a mighty building ballet. As a result, the mouse hole has been beset by dirt and dust, pounded by jackhammer reverberations, battered by giant-truck noises, surrounded by barriers of all sorts, and all but lost to the revered tourist. Are we complaining? Well, perhaps. Are we crazy to want our own mini version of this at home? Clearly. But mostly we are curious—how did they get their building permits?
No doubt these large projects have been through their own journey satisfying numerous committees, permit-granting agencies, and community discussion groups—not to mention securing funding—before they were able to get down to the business of building. But somehow I thought it might be a tad easier for us to get the go-ahead on a teensy home addition of less than 400 square feet. Because I had been so diligent in designing this addition, I assumed it surely would be given a quick and painless approval. Not so much. Fortunately, the process of research and design has been its own reward.
For months I have pored over every shelter book in my possession, staking out and stalking down the ideas that would meet our needs. We hope to add an entryway to our home in the form of an enclosed portal that would appear to have always been part of our little adobe. In addition, we would flank this glassed-in porch with a tiny adobe entry room to our bedroom. The room off the bedroom would provide a route from the outside to the kitchen and bathroom—an alternative to clomping through the bedroom, which is our current circulation pattern. We might also throw in a closet or two—always handy in the storage-free zone typical of a Santa Fe home.
With this focus in mind, a fetching enclosed portal at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art became my dream room. This museum building was designed as the residence for the director of the Laboratory of Anthropology. Both buildings, the home and the lab, were designed by John Gaw Meem, the architect most responsible for bringing New Mexican architecture artfully into the 20th century. The large back portal on the old director’s home had been enclosed at some point by the addition of large and somewhat haphazard paned windows fitted between the upright posts and parapet. Surely it had been a handsome porch before it was enclosed, but once some of the outdoor elements of the architecture were brought indoors, it went from handsome to pure Santa Fe charm. If I could emulate that look and feel, this would be a home addition project worth all of the fleeting anxiety and inconvenience.
Once struck by my dream room, I spent hours gazing intently at a tiny screen looking at itsy-bitsy pictures of historic light fixtures, or I would move outside to stare at drains or gaze up at rooflines. I mentally modified and remodified in an effort to capture the nuances of this wonderful room, realizing that it was the details that took it over the top. But despite this exhilarating planning, we were bogged down by the boring reality of the bureaucratic process. If this were a game of Candy Land, we were stuck in the Molasses Swamp for a seeming eternity.
We suspect gooey wetlands await even the most modest home renovator in our city. We were told that one must cross a gauntlet of 14 city bureaucratic desks to emerge with one tattered building permit. This leads to images of the gates of hell, Cyclops, Minotaurs, hydra-headed creatures, and burning deserts, to say nothing of the stations of the cross. While the Passion took about a week, we spent six months waiting for the official demands of the City Different to play out. Our neighbors asked, solicitously, whatever happened to our building project, and we had to confess that we didn’t have a clue where we went wrong, or even if we went wrong. There was no wrangling or shouting, just a slow grinding of unoiled cogs as we clanked and creaked toward winter.
Now some might try to lay the blame for the delay on living within the historic district, where our home and all of these other massive projects fall. Not us. We sailed right through the requirements of this aspect of the process, no doubt as a tribute to our finely tuned sensitivity to all that is wonderful and historic in our town. In my inimitable nerdy fashion, I was prepared for a question or two from the Historic Design Review committee, only to be disappointed. When the time came for me to show off my fabulous historic credentials, the committee barreled off to the next agenda item.
Little did I know at the time, lo those many, many months ago, that all of this was a mere prelude to the largely unknowable demands of the city’s bureaucrats who, once in a great while, pass out building permits—at some great monetary cost—to humble taxpayers such as me. While mighty buildings go up all around the mouse hole, the little mice must not hope to add on to their tiny nests anytime soon. We watched the dust accumulate on our fancy drawings, the grass and weeds grow, the economy tank, and the glaciers creep forward while we waited.
When the news came that the precious permits had been approved, it came with the realization that the final crab apples have fallen from the tree, signaling winter. As we await our next steps, we can indulge ourselves with even more grandiose building schemes, as well as the mental rearrangement of all of the furniture in the house—so much easier than the real thing.
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.