Santa Fe Style

Just as the Mission style was the "California counterpart" to the Northeast's popular colonial revival style, the Santa Fe style was a reaction to the Mission style of southern California. Basically, the "taste-makers" of Santa Fe and the state of New Mexico wished to distinguish themselves from the spreading image of southern California. Also, with New Mexico gaining status as a new state in 1912, the development of the new style was thought of as a primary method to attract tourists and promote the new state's own identity. The style itself was basically inspired by a mixture of Spanish Colonial and Indian Pueblo architectural forms. It originated in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and quickly became the regional style of Anglo-American northern New Mexico after 1912. Thus, it is often referred to as Santa Fe Style. The first structure to gain the new style in Santa Fe was the Palace of the Governors. Features include flat roof with parapeted wall, irregular/rounded edges to walls, stucco surface, often vigas (round roof beams) extending through walls to the exterior. More recently, the style has become popular outside of New Mexico, in places such as Arizona and southern California. Still, its core area consists of northern New Mexico and the style still creates a distinct Anglo-American identity for the "Land of Enchantment".

The "Santa Fe Style" has come and gone and will come back again to be guaranteed in clothing fashion as well as home fashion But the Santa Fe Style Homes have been around for centuries and will not leave anytime soon. They began with true adobe homes as the practical construction for the original peoples of the Southwest- the Anasazi. They built their condominium-style communities of stone and mud adobe bricks, three and four stories high.

Traditional New Mexican homes today are built of adobe -- sun dried clay bricks mixed with grasses for strength, mortared with simple mud, and then covered with additional protective layers of mud.
The Spanish and Mexican residents who came to Santa Fe later in history continued this adobe style for it's practicability in that it kept the home cool in the summer, and warm in the winter. Few true adobe homes remain in modern Santa Fe. The majority are imitation adobe made of stuccoed concrete.
In the days when adobe homes were prevalent, it was a cheaper form to build with, but now the craftsmanship and tradition are harder to find and as a result more costly. In the Anasazi communities the houses were focused around central plazas, villages incorporated circular spiritual chambers called kivas.

Today's Santa Fe Style Homes must have a fireplace or more than one. The style of the curved corner fireplace is called a Kiva fireplace. Later on in the Spanish era in Santa Fe, homes incorporated the plaza of the Anasazi community into a courtyard in individual homes. The courtyard can be found in the front of a house as a space you walk thru before entering the home, or in the backyard as a place to relax or both. It is usually a sensual experience of flowering plants and fountains. The floor originally was made of mud and can still be seen on occasion in areas of the modern day homes. Tremendous packing is done and some sort of finish is done to maintain the hard packed earth with little dust.

Most floors in the Santa Fe style homes however are of tile, brick or some hard surface. Carpets can be found, but that is not the true Santa Fe style.The roofs are supported by a network of vigas, long beams whose ends protrude through the outer facades, and latillas, small stripped branches layered between the vigas. Adobe homes are distinguished by their flat roofs and soft, rounded contours. These qualities have not changed since its origination. Another feature is the Portal (pronounced Poortaal). These in essence are patios that allow the home owners to extend their home out into the yard facing a beautiful vista of some sort. May thru October is portal weather. Dining and relaxing occur out of doors during this time of year. These portals are usually framed by large local wood corbels (decorated part of columns) and the same heavy wood beams inside the house (vigas) The details of Santa Fe Style homes include nichos which are small carved out spaces in hallways and on walls to display pieces of art or others things of value. Bancos are the curved shelf like area around the fireplace in an adobe homes to display once again something of value or importance. Arched and curved entryways, doorways and walls are very prevalent in Santa Fe style homes. They are part of the total curviness of this style home.

Doors, gates and cupboards in the Santa Fe style home are either actual old wooden doors or painted or carved to look like the old doors. In the old days of New Mexico the doors and gateways were the true protection from the outside world. They were used to block intruders. So a strong formidable door had to be used. The Santa Fe Style homes of today would have many of these qualities but may be replaced or intermixed with other styles such as Country, Ranch, or Mediterranean. It really doesn't matter what other styles are incorporated because if the home is in Santa Fe it has the "Santa Fe Essence" just by its location, history, and culture. It is a style like no other- The Santa Fe Style Home.

Santa Fe Style is a term we all have heard of but in Santa Fe New Mexico it's a way of life.

The Origins of Santa Fe Style

"All the buildings are brownbut it's so beautiful!" a first-time visitor to Santa Fe recently exclaimed. Although this response is typical for today's first- timers, early visitors seldom had such a favorable first impression. More often they found the little village of simple, mud structures and muddy streets to be a crude and unkempt backwater.

Attitudes began to change in the late nineteenth century when anthropologists, artists and a few tourists began exploring the Southwest. Rather, this new breed of visitors was fascinated by the cultures of the local Native American and Hispanic communities and their indigenous styles of architecture, crafts, and art.

By 1910, the Santa Fe city fathers realized that the centuries-old tradition of Pueblo and Spanish architecture was no longer a liability, but an asset that would help attract tourism. They made a concerted effort to encourage new construction based on local building traditions rather than the Victorian styles that had become prevalent after New Mexico became a U.S. territory. This reborn indigenous architecture and design became collectively known as Spanish/Pueblo Revival. Santa Fe Style was born.

Artists and architects immediately took up the cause, developing and enriching the style through the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. From the Spanish tradition, designers borrowed beautifully carved and painted woodwork-especially the decorated vigas or ceiling beams-as well as the long portales or verandas that provided essential shade during Southwestern summers.

From the Pueblo tradition they borrowed the characteristic stepped building shapes that resulted from rooms being added as necessary over the centuries. From both traditions, they employed adobe (mud and straw) bricks covered in mud or stucco plaster which resulted in thick walls, small windows, and beautifully soft, rounded shapes.

The first fully-realized example of the Spanish/Pueblo Revival style is the Museum of Fine Arts, built on the Plaza in 1917 by the firm of Rapp & Rapp. Carlos Vierra, the first professional artist to take up permanent residence in Santa Fe, made careful study of early structures and built the first Revival style residence in 1918. William P. Henderson, a nationally known painter, also designed furniture and buildings in the style as did his artist neighbor, Frank Applegate, who championed the restoration of historic Spanish churches. From the 1920s on, nearly all artists, writers, architects, and other style leaders built their Santa Fe homes in the Spanish/Pueblo Revival style.

True to their interest in indigenous arts, most Revival style homeowners furnished their dwellings with Native pottery, weaving, and other crafts, and with Hispanic furniture, tinwork and religious painting. Some builders, such as Frank Applegate, went so far as to incorporate antique woodwork from historic Spanish buildings that were too dilapidated to restore. Of course, nearly everyone adorned their homes with paintings done by their friends and neighbors who made up the thriving Santa Fe art colony.

Even as the Santa Fe Style took shape, it began to expand and change. In the 1930s, architect John Gaw Meem-one of the early champions of the Spanish/Pueblo Revival and its most gifted practitioner-developed the Territorial Revival Style. Meem based it on adobe structures built in northern New Mexico in the mid- to late-1900s, when Americans were bringing Neo-classical and Victorian design ideas to bear on local building traditions. The symmetrical forms, larger windows, and classical woodwork of Territorial homes made an appropriate setting for high-style Anglo furnishings as well as Native American and Spanish craft items.

Other designers continued to reshape and adapt the Santa Fe Style to accommodate new design influences. Artist and architect, William Lumpkins, brought the study of pre-historic Puebloan structures into his work. He also became a leader in the passive-solar movement; a concept perfectly adapted to New Mexico's sunny skies, and to the excellent thermal properties of adobe which stays cool in summer and warm in winter. The idea was taken a step further in the notorious "Earthships" or partially subterranean adobe houses commonly associated with the Taos communes of the 1960s and 70s. In the post-war era, Meem went on to develop frankly modernist homes of adobe, steel and glass. Even Frank Lloyd Wright applied his unique imagination to an adobe style home.

Given the various paths taken by designers of Santa Fe Style, we no longer can say that the Spanish/Pueblo Revival defines the style. Indeed, many designers and homeowners now find strict adherence to the vigas-pots-and-blankets look to be a self-parody. That was the original inspiration, but we've come a long way since then.

It would be easy just to say, "You know Santa Fe Style when you see it." But here at canyonroadarts.com, we're willing to take the plunge and attempt to define what makes Santa Fe Style today. Rather than point to specific materials or construction techniques or decorative details, we think the Style is really a set of values about design that are inspired by the unique qualities of this place. It can encompass enormous variety and yet it has a defining spirit which is unmistakably Santa Fe.

We believe that the celebration of local cultures remains the core of Santa Fe Style. This was its origin, and it certainly has been a constant throughout its history. That's not to say every detail of a home must be a Native artifact or Hispanic folk object. A little can go a long way. Also remember that Anglo ranchers and traders have been part of the local landscape for more than 150 years, a fact implicitly acknowledged by Meem's Territorial Style architecture. Santa Fe can be a bit cowboy, too.

Because Santa Fe is a unique amalgam of three distinct cultures, eclecticism has always been part of the Style. What's more, the artful mixing of design traditions need not be strictly limited to Native American, Hispanic and Anglo influence. Local designers long have mixed American and European antiques, Mission furniture, and Southeast Asian woodwork into Santa Fe Style homes with great success. Furniture and artifacts from other parts of the world that build with adobe, always seem to have an affinity with Santa Fe. In the past few decades, eclecticism has become by byword in design nationwide, but Santa Fe was there at least half a century before everyone else.

Two things drew artists to Santa Fe in the early twentieth century. One was their interest in indigenous cultures. The other was the natural beauty of the landscape and quality of light in the high desert. Orientation to the natural environment is fundamental to Santa Fe Style. This not only means orienting windows to the view. It also can mean enlivening a room by manipulating the way sunlight moves through the space. It can mean integrating a building into its surroundings with careful use of form, color and materials. It can mean passive-solar design, or harvesting rainwater, or planting xeric landscaping to preserve scarce resources. Santa Fe Style respects and incorporates the natural surroundings that made you want to have a house there in the first place.

One of the surest ways to make a building at home in the landscape is the use of natural materials. Nothing blends better with the earth than adobe-earth itself. Natural wood, flagstone, brick, ceramic tile and river rock also help give an earthy but sophisticated feel to Santa Fe Style homes. Natural materials lend themselves to use in any type of décor from rustic to minimalist, and they make a sympathetic backdrop for pottery, rugs and other indigenous handcrafts.

Early visitors criticized Santa Fe's simple adobe buildings as crude and lacking in style, adornment and, therefore, civility. What was once a fault, however, has become a virtue: the lack of style has become a style of its own. In other words, simplicity is essential to the Santa Fe look. Nowhere is this more clearly revealed than in the famous photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe's home in Abiquiu. Thoughtful design, ample natural light and the use of natural materials can make the simplest home warm and inviting without being cluttered by unnecessary decoration. Design extravagance is the antithesis of Santa Fe Style.

For the artists and architects who first developed the Santa Fe Style, life here was a retreat from the staid social and artistic environment of the East. This embrace of informality continues to pervade Santa Fe design. In fact, all of its attributes promote a casualness that politely ignores the conventions of urban design. Simple, natural, and local add up to freedom from pretense; freedom to create your own style of living.

Considering its origins among the Santa Fe art colony, Santa Fe Style encourages-perhaps requires-the knowledgeable appreciation of art and artists. Whether indigenous craft, ethnic/tribal art, or contemporary fine art, original artworks are indispensable in a Santa Fe Style home. As a small city with a very large number of artists and galleries, Santa Fe provides abundant opportunity to learn past and present trends in the art world and, importantly, to meet the artists. Original art for every taste and budget surrounds us. Participating in Santa Fe's artistic traditions draws us more closely into the life of this place, and enriches our homes and lives every day.