OT: Houses Once Again

[Not much interested in the latest wrinkle of the Clintoooooon Email Scandalllllll because I doubt it will have more than a marginal effect on the (s)election at this point, and because none of the email hooey up to now has amounted to all that much. I can equate it with the more or less "nothingness" of the Snowden NSA revelations which were almost all things we either knew or suspected, and which resulted in essentially no change in the agency's domestic and foreign surveillance -- except perhaps its intensification. Hello.]

So let's deal with houses once again. This one isn't so much of a memory exercise, though that may enter into parts of the post, as it is a consideration of contemporary housing trends in this area of New Mexico, that is to say the north-central corridors between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. We live about mid-way between the two metropoli, on the east side of the Central Mountain Chain, far enough away from each to be relatively untainted by either Santa Fe Style or the urban madness of ABQ, but close enough to get to either one when we need to or want to.

Santa Fe is in some ways a victim of its own style, often referred to as "Adobe Disneyland." It is an ostensibly an honest depiction and reinterpretation of an historic Spanish Colonial architectural vocabulary and vernacular.

But it's always been questioned and questionable. The problem can be manifested clearly at the Palace of the Governors on the Plaza in Old Town Santa Fe, a building which ostensibly dates back to the foundation of the Villa Real, c. 1610. That's actually a dubious claim as the oldest parts of the current structure post-dates the Reconquista of 1692-3 prior to which (between 1680 and 1692) the entire facility and the fort which it was part of had been reconfigured into a pueblo by the Indians whose revolt led to the expulsion of the Spanish.

After the bloody reconquest of Santa Fe and the outlying pueblos by the Spanish, the Palace of the Governors and its extensive Presidio was restored more or less as it had been prior to the Pueblo Revolt and the pueblo constructions were dismantled and destroyed. However, the restoration was largely a reconstruction as not a whole lot of the previous buildings were still standing when the Spanish came back. This is much the same situation as was the case at San Miguel Mission church in the Barrio Analco, which was destroyed by the Indians in the Revolt leaving barely a shell of a structure -- and perhaps not even that -- for the Spanish to rebuild after 1692.

Yet San Miguel is considered the Oldest Church in Santa Fe, if not New Mexico.

What is standing now has less to do with what was originally built and remodeled and rebuilt over the years since than it has to do with the imaginary architecture and buildings that have arisen due to the imposition of Santa Fe Style.

The Palace of the Governors was the first example of the Style, c. 1909. What we see today is what resulted from that imposition; nothing -- substantive -- has changed since then, whereas the appearance and function of the Palace was changing constantly throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

That, to me, is the fundamental flaw of the Style. Once imposed, change is almost impossible.

The Palace of the Governors today appears almost exactly as it did when it was remodeled in the Style in 1909. Next door, across the street, is the New Mexico Museum of Art, built in 1917, in the Style, and it, too, appears almost exactly as it did the day it opened, but that's not how genuine Spanish Colonial/Pueblo architecture was handled back in the day.

Once built, the rebuilding, remodeling, expanding, contracting, re-envisioning and repurposing were constant. Nothing ever stayed the same for long, and the very idea of presenting a permanent appearance and function throughout all time wouldn't have made any sense.

But that's a fundamental factor of Santa Fe Style: once built or remodeled in the Style, the structure must maintain the same appearance for all time to come.

It's jarring and wrong, in my view, to impose such strictures, as it fossilizes what should be dynamic and organic architecture into a design straitjacket.

I use our own home as example of how a domestic building has changed in appearance and function over time, though it has appeared much the same since its last major remodeling fifty some odd years ago.

Our house was begun, built from adobe dug on site, about 1900. We don't know the actual year construction started, but this area was first opened to homesteading and settlement about that time (squatters arrived earlier of course) once the various land-grant claims were quashed by the Supreme Court. It is our impression that the first part of the house to be built was what's now the living room and two bedrooms, but which was originally probably two rooms: a kitchen/work room and a living/sleeping room. There would have been no indoor plumbing. There might have been a windmill pumping water from a well into a raised cistern that probably supplied water to livestock troughs and a pumphouse beside the residence. There would have been an outhouse, as there was no indoor bathroom. We're not sure, but there may not have been an indoor bathroom until the remodeling of the 1950s.

The next part of the house to be built was an addition on the east that was probably built in the 1920s or thereabouts, also from adobe dug on site, that is now two bedrooms, a bath and hallway but which was probably only two rooms, a parlor and a bedroom, originally. The original kitchen/workroom was probably turned into two bedrooms and a hallway at that time. The original living/sleeping room was turned into a kitchen/workroom as it was larger.

Then in the 1950s (a period of dust storms in this area) most of the land this house was headquarters for was sold for building lots, and the house underwent major remodeling. The south-facing front porch/portal was enclosed and became host to an entrance hall, a dining area, a kitchen, and a laundry room. The east wing was remodeled to accommodate a bathroom, hallway and two bedrooms. The central kitchen/workroom became a living room. The exterior was clad in aluminum siding and the shingle pitched roof was covered with corrugated tin.

Apart from new windows and paint, we didn't change the appearance of the exterior nor did we change the function of the interior spaces.

But we might.

In fact the future plans for this house involve some pretty extensive remodeling while preserving as much as we can of the house's original character.

After removing the aluminum siding and repairing the stucco underneath, we would have a new propanel roof installed, probably blue or copper color. With the roof, however, we intend to finish the attic into a bedroom and bath and a large north-facing studio. This will mean re-building part of the rafters and reorienting the gable on the north side of the east addition to face east. But if we're going to do that, we'll go ahead and rebuild the enclosed portal that now serves as entry hall, dining area, kitchen and laundry room. In fact, it was not built very well to begin with, and because there is a kind of cellar under the former porch, part of it is slowly sinking into the void. Consequently, it requires a new foundation and reconstruction.

If we do that, we'd add a new portal/porch on the south wide enough to cut the glare from the summer and winter sun and also allow for outside leisure activities. If we add a porch there, we'd also add one on the west side of the house where hot summer afternoon sun can be a real problem. Temporary shade would become permanent. Interestingly there are large old elm trees on the west, but they only partially block the afternoon sun.

Rebuilding the south side of the house would allow us to extend the entrance hall some four feet or so to the south, and that would make it large enough to accommodate more than one guest at a time. It would also allow us to put in a bay window in the eating area of the kitchen which will make it somewhat less cramped. Right now we can only seat three at a time in the kitchen eating area, and we'd like to accommodate four.

The kitchen itself could use a remake. It's adequate to our needs, and so it does not require either enlarging or significant reconfiguring. We'd like to install better cabinetry -- the current cabinets are particle board -- 50 or 60 years old -- and have not held up well. I've long felt that a 50s style kitchen would be fun, so have been looking for a reasonably priced Wedgewood or O'Keefe and Merit stove from the era, and even potentially a working period refrigerator. We've had dishwashers in some of the places we've lived over the years, but we hardly ever used them. They always seemed to be more trouble than they are worth. But because of our advancing age, we would consider installing one in a newly envisioned kitchen. We don't have one now, and we don't miss it.

Real linoleum on the floor -- as opposed to the current vinyl sheet goods -- would be ideal, and in fact  linoleum was one of my requests during the initial renovation before we moved in. The problem was two fold-- the contractor did not know what I was talking about, and once I carefully walked him through what linoleum was, he discovered it wasn't available in this area of New Mexico -- he could get it, but it would take a while -- it cost a LOT more than sheet vinyl and that might break the budget (it wouldn't, but the budget would top out at just about what we'd agreed to), and he could find no one locally who knew how to install it. Finally, he said he couldn't install it during the winter because the house had no heat yet, and the linoleum would crack in the cold. So we went with sheet vinyl which after ten years is looking pretty ratty.

In order for the tap water here to be usable, it must be treated with an acid -- such as citric acid or vinegar --  in order to cut the very high alkalinity and mineral content. The water comes from an underground aquifer that is the bed of a former lake, and it has very high concentrations of lime and calcium and so on. We have investigated various non-salt ways of treating the water (most folks around here just add a little bit of vinegar whenever they draw the tap water). We've pretty much settled on a citric acid injection system.

We want to combine the two small (8 X 11) bedrooms on the west side of the house into one bedroom (11 X 16). We would also add a small bathroom by cannibalizing part of the laundry room. The laundry room now houses a very large hot water heater, and because of that, we can't get the washer and dryer to fit side by side. If we had a smaller water heater in a different position, side by side washing/drying equipment would be possible, and thus the laundry room could be much more compact.

The current living room would become a dining room which would include a stairway to the second floor and lots of bookshelves. We now have our books in bookcases in every room, so we would like to combine as many as possible in one room, a dining room cum library. Using the current living room as a dining room would mean adding a new living room as a wing off the north side of the house, adding another 320 square feet or so. Because it would be on the north side of the house, it would have east, west and northern exposures.

There is no central heat or air conditioning in this house, so if we can do it efficiently, we would add them. The problem of course is that the adobe walls are very thick (almost 3' on the north side) and finding ways to run ductwork is no easy feat. It simply may not be possible, and if it's not, we have alternatives including split systems, and even sticking with what we use now, window air conditioners and a big free-standing gas heater. We've also looked into installing gas fireplace-heaters in each wing, and a wood-burning fireplace in the new living room.

The bronze-framed dual pane windows installed during the initial renovation look nice, but they're not holding up well, and some have become difficult to open and close. One was shot with a b-b gun years ago and has now cracked clear across. I would want to replace them all at the same time the rest of the remodeling is done.

We would fence in part of the property on the west side of the new living room creating an enclosed patio-garden which we could make as lush as we like with roses and many other kinds of flowers. Outside that area, further west and north, we'd have raised beds in which to grow whatever we can. Because of the altitude (6,300 ft), dryness and long winters, not everything grows here, but our friends at IAIA have come up with an excellent covered raised bed formula that extends the growing season, and offers an easy method of cultivation for many crops that don't grow here very well at all out in the open.

The rest of the landscaping would be pretty much solely xeriscaping and fostering volunteer native plants like wild lilac.

We'd move our storage outbuilding from beside the house to the northeast corner of the property where it could serve eventually as a "tiny house" for guests, though that would probably be far in the future if it ever happened at all.

Finally, the separate garage would either get rebuilt or replaced -- right now I'm favoring replacement, but that could change. There are other outbuildings, one of which is approximately as old as the house itself which we would like to preserve as a kind of artifact, but it's starting to lean a bit, and I'm afraid it might collapse one day, so we're not sure whether to reconstruct it or merely prop it up.

This is of course a major remodel, but we would hope that the result is compatible with the various expansions and remodels the house has gone through over its long history. This is a genuine Territorial New Mexico house, originally built during the Territorial period and repeatedly remodeled, expanded, and renovated ever since. There's no reason to stop that process now or necessarily at any time in the future. These changes are organic to the kind of place it is.

The fossilization  that occurs to many New Mexico buildings that are built in "Santa Fe Style" or that undergo a "Santa Fe Style" renovation or remodel is to me a sad result of a Disneyland-ish architectural ethic that became standard -- required in the historic district -- over a century ago in Santa Fe and has spread to other areas of the state. It's sad in that nothing is allowed to (significantly) change once the style is set. But that's not how living, organic architecture or communities are or should be.

Whether we do an extensive remodel of our house one day or not, we can be sure that this house will not stay the same over an extended period. It might even be demolished one day and another house take its place. But that's what happens and is perfectly normal in a vibrant living community, rather than one that's preserved in an often inappropriate aspic.

[This post started off with the idea of dealing with contemporary housing trends in New Mexico, but then it veered into other considerations. The spur to writing it was consideration of a friend's house in El Dorado (a rural-ish suburb of Santa Fe) that she's trying to sell. It has many of the hallmarks of contemporary Santa Fe Style, but ultimately it doesn't really work as any style at all. It's a mish mash, and that is common among newer houses built in the Style or a facsimile of it. Because the Style has become so attenuated, alternatives have been growing in popularity, particularly in Albuquerque. High end contemporary domestic architecture, particularly in Albuquerque, has achieved national and international recognition, and many of its elements are available to those on a limited budget in the many live-work, loft and multi-family buildings that have been built in ABQ in recent years.

Housing in standard developments, however, tends to emulate Santa Fe Style -- badly -- or to follow style trends current in suburban developments in California -- such as the ever popular "Tuscan" style, or "Craftsman" or various iterations of the all time favorite "Ranch." In other words, there is nothing particularly "New Mexican" about most of the houses built in recent years, and those that pretend to emulate Santa Fe Style fail and generally fail badly.

I actually like Santa Fe Style domestic architecture when it's done well. The problem is that doing it well is criminally expensive these days, to the point where only the very wealthiest clients can afford it. Given its inherent limitations, many of those who can afford it would rather purchase an extant and well-done house than build a new one in the Style. Consequently, new houses in Santa Fe Style done well are becoming rare, while there continues to be a hot market in older and rather grand homes that were built in the Style decades ago, starting literally with Carlos Vierra's home ('the Ruins' it was called) on the Old Santa Fe Pecos Trail built in 1918 (I've written about it before.)  Other artists' homes -- Frank Applegate (1) (2), Witter Bynner, Gustave Baumann, Gerald Cassidy among others -- are all in variations of the Style as it was understood by artists and architects in the early 20th Century, and they are all interesting and compelling interpretations of historic designs in what was then contemporary garb. Any one of them would make a comfortable home today but not a "stylish" one in the sense of current contemporary must-haves. But the ones that have been on the market have run into the millions of dollars to purchase. A brand new house in the Style would cost as much or more.

So. It isn't often done any more at the high end, and many more modest interpretations are failures.

On the other hand, standard suburban housing, no matter the style, is often uninteresting and ultimately uncomfortable with its insistence on "open concept" living, granite, stainless, pendant and recessed lighting, laminate or carpeted floors, and so on. In other words, the standard contemporary housing vocabulary results in something that's almost a prison of contemporary "must haves" that ultimately have nothing to do with comfort, convenience or the real needs of families.

People like us -- people who don't have a lot of money but who wish to live comfortably in a historic home -- do well to find and rehab an old adobe (they're out there), perhaps not stylishly, but livably. And do as we do, consider other renovations and expansions over time. This kind of home becomes a living, organic residence, in tune with the needs of its residents, not particularly fretful over "authenticity" -- since that's built in -- and subject to change and alteration as needs arise.

That's what I have to say about the subject for now...

OT: Houses

Looks like quite an interesting place:



Las Milpas -- "The [Corn]Fields". I've passed by it any number of times without realizing it was there. It's set back quite a ways from the street, and I'm not at all sure you can even see it when passing by. For sale. $12.5 million. A sure thing. This is not the most expensive property I've ever seen listed in Santa Fe, but it's close to it. Some of the swells have that kind of money to be sure, but whether any of them would be willing to part with their lucre for an "authentic-historic" adobe (supposedly the only one on the Eastside) is an open question.

The listing says the house was built in 1886, well into the Territorial period, so I have a difficult time believing it was built the way it appears now -- a rather early colonial casa (c. 1700) that's been added to but only slightly modified over the years by people with plenty of money. Yes, this is a big place, and even in the 1880s a place like this would have cost a good deal to build and even more to maintain.

No, I suspect it was built as a fairly ordinary Victorian house -- modified for adobe construction and local weather conditions -- and then later (probably in the1920s) it was remodeled into the formative Spanish-Pueblo "Santa Fe Style" that nowadays makes Santa Fe into what's been called "Adobe Disneyland."

So I did a little  research and discovered that actually, Las Milpas was in fact remodeled in the 1920s and the current compound is a relatively recent renovation, remodel and expansion done by one of Santa Fe's show business elite in authentic early colonial style. Well, well, well. It's more like a setting for a movie that's now passing for a museum.

There are several house museums in the region (Casa San Ysidro, Las Golondrinas) that preserve something of the Spanish colonial era lifestyle for the edification of contemporary schoolchildren, scholars and visitors. I used to be fascinated with these sorts of places in California (where there are quite a few of them) and I enjoy the ones I've found in New Mexico.

We live in something of an Old House ourselves.

As I've mentioned previously, our house is a pioneer adobe, started about 1900 when this area was (finally) opened for settlement by the courts (including the Supreme Court) which extinguished competing land grant claims. Its style is not that of Santa Fe. It's pretty standard late Victorian, and the only way you'd know this is an adobe house is by the thick walls and deep window recesses. The adobe and stucco were covered with aluminum siding in the 1950s when the house was last remodeled. So friends who've come to visit sometimes have a hard time picturing its adobe-ness and antiquity.

Most people don't want to live in places like this because they're really pretty rough and can be hard to heat, cool and maintain. They're drafty, not well insulated (despite the legendary insulation properties of adobe), the floors creak, they're dusty and a home for spiders and other fauna, and in our case, there is no finished floor over most of the house. The subfloor (ancient and refinished) is the finished floor, and it's been that way from the get go.

Our pipes freeze regularly in the winter because of the lack of insulation on the one hand and our tendency to forget to run a stream of water through the pipes during particularly cold weather. Thankfully, the previous owner replaced the galvanized iron pipes with plastic that doesn't burst when the pipes freeze. Good move.

During particularly cold and windy weather, drafts come up through the floor and it can get very chilly at floor level. On the other hand, the heaters can generally defeat the drafts if they're on long enough -- which means that our utility bills can be pretty high, certainly much higher than they were in California. But then the tradeoff is that our basic housing expense is half or less of what it was in California.

We haven't tried to retro-remodel the place into something like it might have appeared when it was first constructed, though we have a lot of old stuff inside the house. I've thought about doing a major remodel retro-remodel, though.

If we did, our place would probably look something like this:

But when I checked on costs to do this kind of remodel some time ago, I found it was well beyond our budget. More than likely, it still is. The cost to do it is probably two or three times the value of the house in any case.

Some people have wondered why we live in this house when there ought to be others which would suit our needs -- possibly better than this house does  -- and not cost so much to maintain, heat and cool?

I was attracted to this house from the moment I saw its picture in the listing ten years ago, and when I visited and learned some of its history, I said, "This is the one." From the time I was little, I wanted to live in an adobe house. The idea of living in a house built from the earth itself appealed to me. The fact was that people had been making and living in such houses for thousands of years, and it seemed to me to be a thoroughly natural way to use available resources for shelter.

Indians in New Mexico had long used a form of adobe to build their pueblo communities, but they didn't -- generally -- use adobe bricks. Instead they built with hand-shaped "turtles" -- roundish masses surrounded with adobe mud. They also used puddled adobe and forms of construction which resembled pottery making.

When the Spanish came, brick making was introduced. It was revolutionary in the sense that it was much faster than the Indian way of building with adobe, but it didn't really change the nature of the structures that were built. Spanish colonial structures were generally separated rather than coalesced as was the case with many of the Indian pueblos that functioned as apartment buildings, but the nature of the structures built by the Spanish and those built by the Indians -- multiple rooms for housing and storage typically built around a plaza or courtyard -- were almost identical.

The main difference was the number of people (and animals) housed in any given compound and the finish and decoration of the resulting structures.

Las Milpas is intended to resemble a Spanish colonial compound that would have been built over a couple of centuries (say 1700-1900) by generations of a particular Spanish family. While it claims to be "authentic," it's actually an "authentic re-creation." It's not original, in other words.

However, as a re-creation, it's quite appealing. When I first saw the photos of the place, I was captivated. If only our place looked like that! Well, no. On second thought, no.

I think Las Milpas would be a very difficult place to live in.

It seems to ramble somewhat randomly -- which is (and isn't) "authentic." It doesn't appear to have modern heating (which might be a problem in the cold-cold Santa Fe winters.) I don't see a kitchen among the pictures at all (although there must be one, no? One is mentioned in the story. but maybe the cooking is fired by wood, and water is carried in jars from the acequia out back?) and only one bathroom is pictured. For some reason, I feel something of a shiver when I see it. Brr.

In other words, it seems like the effort to make it authentically historic has made it difficult or impossible to include modern conveniences. That's OK up to a point, but there comes a point where the discomfort level rises so much that almost nothing else matters...

No, let's not be quite so deliberately uncomfortable.

And yet Las Milpas has a very strong appeal -- to me. I think I would really like to imagine myself living there at some point in the long-ago. It reminds me in some ways of Mabel Dodge Luhan's Los Gallos house in Taos. That house was expanded from a core of four rooms to quite a large place in the 1920s, and it has a great deal of appeal to visitors and caretakers alike. It is "authentic" in the sense that it was built by Indian labor according to Indian designs (Tony Luhan was the builder-creator). But there are modern conveniences, and so the discomfort level is lessened.

If we ever do retro-remodel our own house, I suspect the result will be a sort of hybrid between high -- or low -- Victorian and Arts and Crafts. Box beams instead of vigas, for example, touches of stained glass, wood floors instead of ceramic tile, and probably fireplaces with mantles instead of the kiva style so popular in the Santa Fe tradition.

But that may be years away if it ever comes...

(I've been working on another post about houses I've lived in over the years that have been influential in the way I see things... one day I may find time to complete it and post it!)

OT: A Vanished World

Intriguing

We've been spending the last few days working on the house, primarily rearranging furniture -- which is becoming more and more difficult as we get older -- and while taking a break, I came across the picture above, an illustration for an Armstrong Linoleum ad from a December, 1921,  Delineator magazine (available online from the ever-popular Google Books.)

A big part of the project currently underway is trying to find room in the house for more of the books... so far, no luck. We have so many books in the house as it is, and there are probably as many books again still in storage -- even though I made a point of donating hundreds and hundreds of books before we moved last fall.

When I came across the illustration above, I had a surprisingly visceral response, almost as if I had once been in that room ages ago when I was a child. It's not unlike rooms that friends of the family might have lived in -- even in the early 1950s. My parents were old when I came along, after all, and though my father was into modern stuff, my mother and most of her friends were very traditionalist. A room like the one above would suit them to a tee.

I noticed there are only a handful of books visible in the picture. While some people had a lot of books in their homes, most didn't. One borrowed from a library if one wanted a book to read -- far more than one purchased books -- not so much because books were so costly (they weren't, not really), but because they were such a burden and bother to store and take care of, not to mention what a problem they were to lug around.

Out in the studio, we have a bookshelf which came from one of my childhood homes, probably one of the earlier ones in California. We moved a lot when I was little, so I can't be sure which house it was originally purchased for, but I can recall it standing tall next to the Philco console radio in the living room of the house on Mill St. in Santa Maria, so it must have been purchased before 1953 before I started kindergarten.

The bottom shelf had the encyclopedia volumes purchased at about the same time, the rest of the shelves contained book club novels and a handful of children's volumes (Little Golden Books). I would say that altogether there were no more than 25 books in the whole case. The rest of the space had knick knacks . I remember there were a number of "Oriental" things, wood carvings and porcelain, and a scent bottle that had cotton stuffed in it, cotton that smelled exactly like the heady camphor or cedar wood incense smell of a Chinese merchant's store.

So far as I can recall, it was the only bookcase and those were the only "real" books we had in the house. There were magazines and assorted paperbacks, but they didn't stick around very long; paperbacks in those days had a tendency to fall apart (either the book paper would start disintegrating or the glue holding the book together would dry out and the volume would spontaneously disassemble...). Magazines were considered temporary and weren't generally saved unless there was something important in them. Of course, now I wish I still had some of them (and yes, in addition to many books, we have a plethora of magazines, some of them quite old, that have been collected over the years.)

I started collecting books on my own in high school, and I still have quite a few I acquired then -- though I gave many of them away. I still have a couple of Little Golden Books and one or two volumes of the New Standard Encyclopedia that I had when I was a child. Most of these and the rest of the books we have are of no particular monetary value, though some, I'm told, may fetch a few hundred dollars if a buyer were handy. I can't recall ever selling any of the books I've ever owned, though I'm sure I've given away or donated thousands of them.

What I notice about the room above -- in addition to the minimal number of books -- is the relative lack of furniture and lighting fixtures, the surprising color coordination, and the remarkable filtered sunlight coming through the lightly curtained and shaded windows.

The time of day must be early morning or late afternoon when the slanting rays of the sun could reach all the way into the house beyond the porches and roof overhangs. I'm guessing the house faces east or west, though it is possible that similar sunlighting effects can be generated in the winter near midday in a south facing room.

At any event, the sunlighting and the whole atmosphere of the room are highly evocative to me, evocative of memories partially formed, from a time when I was very young, perhaps only two or three, and I went with my mother to visit an elder lady who lived down the street in a tidy bungalow with a wide front porch, a low picket fence, a flagstone path,  and a brown painted screen door. The front door was multi-panes of glass.

I think I even remember her name now. It was Mrs. Fawcett, and I remember her as compact, gray-haired, wearing a print dress with a white apron. Sensible shoes. The kind of Oxfords old ladies wore back in the day.

It seems that I can remember her lilting voice, easy laugh, and the slight smell of linament and flour that came off her clothes. She was cooking in the kitchen, getting something ready for the oven, perhaps a cake, when we arrived. She ushered us into the living room -- a room not unlike the one above -- and went back to her labors in the kitchen, joining us a few minutes later.

I thought the room -- and her whole house, for that matter -- was a wonderland. Apart from being neat and clean and rather sparely furnished, there were so many things to catch my eye. The pictures on the walls, the candlesticks on the mantle, the books and magazines scattered about, and though I don't recall there being so many drawers in her room as there are in the picture, if there had been drawers, I'd want to know what was in them. And I loved the feeling of comfort from the sunlight...

It's not that we lacked these things in our own house. We might not have had a fireplace, though some of the houses we lived in did have one. We had the usual furnishings, though in our house, it was all maple "Early American," purchased new in the late 40's or early 50's. There was that console radio of course. No TV. Not that early, though we got one by 1954, a big (it seemed to me) Packard Bell in a blonde wood cabinet. It was put in the den while the radio stayed in the living room. There was an assortment of braided rugs on the (typically) oak floors, some of the rugs were made by my mother and sister.

The pictures on the walls were a series of framed Currier and Ives prints that my mother was inordinately proud of. I think there were six of them. Over the couch (that's what it was called, not a sofa, divan or davenport) hung a large mirror in a gilt curvilinear frame, probably something salvaged from the Art Nouveau era and painted gold, but I really don't know where it came from. I know it was a beast to handle when we moved. Heavy and awkward. There were brass lamps with dark green paper shades on the tables, and a floor lamp to read by. The curtains were plain muslin; ruffled criss-cross priscillas or cafe style depending on the room. The upholstery on our furniture was a fairly bold plaid or dark green tweed.

Practically everywhere we lived, though, the main room faced north, so the sunlight came into the bedrooms or the kitchen, not the living room -- which typically stayed fairly dark all the live long day, even when, as in one house I can remember very clearly, there was a large picture window to let in the light.

Rooms in the houses where we lived were painted gray or beige or they had wildly flowered wall papers, such as you might have seen in the 1940's. Nobody painted rooms white in those days.

Some of the places where we lived were fairly old, but none were Victorian or Craftsman bungalow style. Most, I would say, were built in the 1940's and were fairly standardized "modern," though not "moderne."

Mrs. Fawcett, on the other hand, lived in a genuine stick-style bungalow, and she'd probably lived there since the house was new, thirty or more years before. That, I think, was part of the charm of the place to me. She'd lived there forever, while we were always moving -- which meant living relatively lightly and easily packed.  In a place like Mrs. Fawcett's, nothing was ever packed for moving. It was always there. Her stuff was old, much older than anything we had, and the wood was dark, not maple. Her pictures were landscapes, portraits and flowers, probably prints or even pages from magazines which people collected and framed and hung with pride especially during the Depression.

Her rugs were woven, not braided, though I can't imagine they were actually Persian or anything like that. Her floors were wood like ours, not linoleum -- which simply didn't appear outside of kitchens and baths. I can only recall one house I've ever been in where linoleum was used outside those rooms (in fact, all the rooms in that particular house had linoleum floors) and the less said about it, the better.

[A side note on linoleum: When we had our house in New Mexico renovated, the contractor and I went round and round about "linoleum." When I told him I wanted (genuine) linoleum in the kitchen and bath, he asked what pattern... I knew that these days linoleum comes in colors, but you can only get one pattern: speckled. The fancy prints and patterns of yore are long gone. I said I wanted green in the kitchen and sort of terra cotta in the bathroom. But what pattern he wanted to know. I said you can only get speckled linoleum nowadays. Your only choice is color. He said, "Oh no, you can get any kind of pattern you want. Just go to Armstrong's website and pick something out." I said, "I want linoleum." "Yeah, I know." Of course, he meant vinyl flooring, I meant linoleum. They are very different animals. No matter how I tried to explain it to him, he didn't get it. Vinyl flooring was "linoleum" as far as he was concerned, and the genuine article -- which is still obtainable though at a steep price -- didn't even figure in his thinking. When I finally got him to recognize there was a difference and that genuine linoleum was what I wanted, he put up one roadblock to using it after another. The price was double that of vinyl (actually more than that) and it would blow the budget, it wasn't available, couldn't even special order, would take too long, it was too difficult to work with, etc., etc. The real problem, I realized, was that he didn't have workers who were familiar enough with it to do a proper job, and it was winter when it is difficult/impossible to handle linoleum in an unheated house. Because we are going to have to re-renovate the kitchen and bath anyway (it's a long story), I settled on vinyl as a temporary solution. It's fine. For now. But I still want linoleum.]

Only recently I came to realize that my mother grew up in houses that resembled the illustration at the top of the page, whereas my father grew up in a relatively high Victorian atmosphere with parlors and servants and all the rest of it. The lifestyle is completely different, of course.

My mother would remain a traditionalist (though she preferred everything "new") whereas my father would become quite a modernist and prefer "new and lean". The differences in their approaches were stark.

As we make all the adjustments in the house here in New Mexico, trying to find room for more books (!) I'm imagining how various pieces of memory have become part of this house. There are a few pieces of furniture that have been with me or with my wife since we were children, but most of what we have now is what we have accumulated over the years, most of it purchased when it was already old. There is very, very little in this house that we purchased new -- and that's mostly electronics and appliances. New furnishings have never really appealed to me, whereas the old stuff has "character." Some of what we have now resembles what appears in the illustration at the top of the page, but a lot of it comes from a different time/space altogether. There are distinct eras: Victoriana, Craftsman/Mission Oak, 1930's (even some Moderne, though I got rid of most of the chrome stuff), 1940's (the Mahogany Era), and so on. We've also managed to pick up a few "New Mexico" pieces that are made from recycled materials to look old.

The room in the illustration above is clearly 1920's and the style is unified in a sort of pseudo-Colonial effect (that's still very '20s) in a coordinated red/brown/tan color scheme. There is no real style unity in our house these days, though we've tried for color unity -- our bedroom is The Blue Room; the guest room is The Red Room, though both bedrooms' walls are painted yellow; the living room furniture and rugs are in browns and tans, though the paintings are mostly in greens and blues and the walls are "Navajo White" (a somewhat difficult to explain color that is not white but vaguely tan; on the other hand, in florescent light, it's typically quite yellow; the kitchen and dining area are yellow and green. We have wide-board pine floors in some rooms;  narrower maple (or possibly poplar) floors in the bedrooms.

We use a wide variety of rugs on the wood floors, some of the smaller ones are handwoven Persian, the larger ones are mostly Couristan/Karastan (and similar), as well as carved Chinese rugs in halls and our bedroom.

I know where we are going to find most of the room we need for more books: the Jesus Room. Right now it's being used to store all sorts of miscellaneous stuff which needs sorting. Once that's done, there will be quite a bit more room for book shelves and books. (Smile.) I've recently learned, too, that the santo shrine that gives the room its name, the shrine I've been calling the room's "nicho," is actually called an alacena or cupboard. The one we have filled with santos was probably used as a winter refrigerator (there is a blocked up window and room for shelves). There's another one as well, under the window, that may also have been used as a cooler. Both go all the way through the adobe wall and have thin barriers to the outside. 

Meanwhile, the dust has been rising again, rising in great billowing clouds. They seem to pass by fairly quickly, but there's surely another one ready to blow in from the west. The word is, the dust will be rising for the next couple of days thanks to a low pressure system over Colorado.

Time to move the living room couch and ponder more memories...

OT: The Gustave Baumann House in Santa Fe

Well, this is interesting. The Gustave Baumann house in Santa Fe is (or was) listed for sale (I just discovered the listing. I suspect was on the market for a while, but according to some sources, it's not on the market currently.)  For almost as long as I've been looking at New Mexico real estate listings, the homes of many of the painters and artists who made their way to Santa Fe in the early part of the 20th century have been coming on the market, sometimes for fabulous prices. Gustave Baumann was one of the seminal figures in the Santa Fe art colony, primarily working as a print-maker, and his home was a veritable tiny fantasmagoria of his own invention.

Carlos Vierra's home on the Old Pecos Trail was one of the first, if not the first, significant artist home built in Santa Fe. It is one I long admired, a substantial, neo-Pueblo style place on a large lot. When it was built in 1918-1919, it was way out of town, and it's still not exactly in town, though the town has crept out around it like kudzu.



It was listed at the height of the real estate market at something like $2,600,000, which at the time seemed a bit steep, but given the size of the property and the historical significance of the house, it was at least conceivable that someone would pay that. But they didn't. The house sat on the market for two, maybe close to three years, without a sale. The price dropped to $1,900,00, then to $1,600,000. Finally, it did sell, though I don't know what the price was. I'll bet it was in that neighborhood, and it's probably a corporate executive stay these days. We pass by it every time we go to Santa Fe, and it seems quite un-homey these days, but I haven't any real idea what's become of it, and the truth is, except for some outbuildings and part of the upper floor, you can't really see it from the street because of the screening pine trees planted outside the wall around the property. At least it wasn't torn down or turned into a bed and breakfast or a shop like so many have been.

(Speaking of, since I think part of the Shuster compound is now a bed and breakfast): Will Shuster's place also went on the market a while ago, for fabulous money, and I scarfed some of the pictures from the listing for future reference when we continued the renovations of our own house. I liked the details on the stairs and the flattened punched Mobil Oil cans used to decorate the kitchen cabinets in the guest house, but now I can't find the pictures. I think they were on the hard drive of one of the computers that died back in the day. The hard drives of our various dead computers are currently stashed in several rooms of the house, and we need to consolidate them. So many things are still in boxes. We'll get to it. Eventually.

The Gustave Baumann house was built in 1923, and it doesn't follow the standard set by the Carlos Vierra house begun in 1918, not at all, and its distinctiveness may be one reason it is considered such a treasure today. The curving adobe shapes and masses of the Vierra house essentially became the model for the widespread neo-Pueblo Santa Fe Style in house design. It became routine, even mass produced, in Santa Fe and Albuquerque and elsewhere in New Mexico until well into the 1950's. It was only later that the severely straight-lined and cubical massing characterized by the Baumann house became stylish, and interestingly, it is now commonplace in new housing developments. You almost never see the Vierra style in new construction any more -- partly, no doubt. because even the ricos can't afford it.

Though the Baumann house feels much like other Santa Fe artist's residences, it also, perhaps strangely, evokes the standard little suburban semi-Spanish bungalow from the era of its construction. Its sharp lines even convey an Art Deco sensibility, something you see very little of in Santa Fe.

It is a very small house. Two bedrooms, one bath, a large living room (that once had a stage for puppet performances), a small kitchen, an even tinier dining room, and a remarkable skylit octagonal gallery/entrance hall, where Baumann used to display his works for sale.

His studio is in a corner of the property. There is a garage and a shed, space for gardens, and that's essentially it. The property is a "compound" in the sense the word is used in Santa Fe, but it's quite wee compared to most, and the diminutiveness of the whole is part of its charm.

Baumann decorated much of the house with his own artistic fancies, from the distinctive front gate to the gilded "Koshare" emblem poking up from the roof of the gallery skylight. He did much of the wood carving decorating the house, if not all of it, and he designed and built most of the doors and gates. He actually designed the house himself, but he had it rendered by an architect friend of his, and had it built by the architect's brother.

The Historic Santa Fe Foundation purchased the house in 2008 and set about conserving and restoring it, with plans -- I thought -- to use it as a house museum and meeting place. What happened to those plans, I don't know, but I do know they were trying to accomplish a rather extensive conservation and restoration task during the worst period of the economic free-fall, and they had a difficult time raising money for the project.

But they did produce a number of videos documenting the project, and they are well worth watching -- for those interested in this sort of historic detail...

When I saw the listing for the house, at $1,100,000, I figured they'd given up on it. The price they were asking was breathtaking. Even in Santa Fe, where significant properties will bring that price and more, it seemed steep for the Baumann place. We are still in a real estate market slump after all, and the renovations and restoration of the Baumann house and studio, I understand, have not been completed. In addition, I believe that any purchaser must agree to preserve and protect the house and studio in close to the style and condition it had during Baumann's lifetime, with heavy restrictions on what can and cannot be done to and with the property. This is not the place for a typical owner.

The house is built largely of adobe, and when it was purchased by the Foundation, there were large cracks on many of the walls due to uneven settling of the foundations. Repairing -- and repainting -- the cracks was among the first orders of business in the restoration, and I thought the way they did it was interesting, and extraordinarily complex.

Yes, well. Our house, too, is built mostly of adobe, and when we bought it, it was in sad, and in places, crumbling shape. There were pretty large cracks in the walls, and there were places where the plaster had fallen away from the interior walls completely, exposing the adobe bricks. The stone foundation, we found, was essentially set on top of hard packed surface soil, not dug into the ground (at least so far as we can tell), and so it has settled quite unevenly, meaning that some of the floors slope noticeably, and the walls continue to crack. Our floors are wide pine boards in part of the house and what appear to be narrow maple (or some other hardwood, not oak) boards in another wing. So far as we can tell, there is no subfloor beneath the wide boards; they are directly on the floor joists. The narrow boards, however, appear to be on a subfloor. But gaps between floor and walls can lead to surprising drafts.

I'm sure there are plenty of such quirks at the Baumann place as well. People who are used to more rigorous and modern building standards would probably be put off by such things as air and roof leaks and slopes and cracks and so on that you're liable to find in an old adobe house, let alone the simple lack of electrical outlets and the somewhat primitive plumbing facilities. "How could people live this way?!" runs the refrain. Well, they did. Somehow they managed.

What we deal with more than anything else it seems, are the air leaks in our house. The windows leak cold air -- despite the fact that they are energy-efficient replacements. The weatherstripping on the doors is leaky. And when the wind blows, there are air leaks and drafts around the perimeters of the rooms in the adobe part of the house, as if there is a gap between the floorboards and the walls. Oh. Well, of course there is. It's the nature of the construction.  In the winter, part of my task it to find out where cold air is coming in and block the drafts. It's an ongoing task because when one draft is blocked another appears.

I wouldn't doubt that there are similar issues in the Baumann house, and I'm sure they're just as aggravating if not more so. How can people live this way?

You're always doing maintenance things in an old adobe house, as I'm sure the Baumanns were during their 40 years' living in their little cubical house on Camino de las Animas in Santa Fe. Not only do you do constant little, and occasional big, maintenance things in an adobe house, you learn what you can let go, too, and not worry too much about -- which I'm still getting a handle on. In a way, you have to listen to the place and understand that it is a living part of the earth. Learn not to be so concerned with its appearance and become more concerned with its spirit. The house will tell you what it needs.

In 2009, a historic property report (pdf) was prepared for the Gustave Baumann house which details a lot of the property's historic importance as well as its many artistic features and quirks at the time of its restoration. Together with the videos prepared by the Historic Santa Fe Foundation and the real estate listing, it gives a surprisingly realistic picture of what life was like in Santa Fe during the early and some of the later years of the Santa Fe artists' colony -- before the colony became an industry.

I've been pondering how something initially so simple, even naive, became the economic dynamo that it is today -- and whether that is such a good thing.