FEATURES

KNIGHT’S CASTLE

Euro style plus family warmth

Mike Knight has traveled the world. He and his family are connected to countries from Asia to Europe, and when they vacation, it’s likely you’ll find them in Switzerland or Hungary. And now he has brought elements of old European design to his 4,000-square-foot home in the mountains east of Albuquerque, creating a rustic castle in the Woodlands.

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EUROPEAN CLASSIC

Designing for timeless elegance

“When you walk into this house, you won’t believe you are in Albuquerque.” So the effervescent designer/decorator Moses T. Zabec (henceforth simply Moses) describes a new home that he and his associate Steffany Hollingsworth worked on for over two years. With others in his shop, Moses At Home, he assisted with the original design of the house and found artists, artisans, and craftspeople to accomplish the difficult task his client—a family of four—had set for him. The goal was to build, decorate, and furnish a grand and elegant European-style home from an earlier era.

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ORCHESTRATING
LIGHT AND SPACE

Dynamic architecture

H. Glenn Murray remembers the exhilarating feeling of walking into the home he designed for Rhonda Arkana and Sue Skelly right after all the walls were put up. The design and implementation of this truly unique home was an exciting challenge for the custom architect who owns a full service architectural firm specializing in custom commercial and residential projects in New Mexico and southern Colorado. Murray is also a licensed general contractor. On occasion he provides professional construction manager services to ensure successful completion of projects. Since the Arkana/Skelly home had some special design considerations, he decided that acting as construction manager was in the project’s best interest.

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IN PRAISE OF
OLD ADOBE HOMES

Placitas remodel with village charm

Pearl and Robert Healey’s Casa de las Huertas nestles behind a low adobe wall in the heart of Placitas. In summer, water trickles to the garden and trees through century-old, hand-dug acequias that weave across the grounds. In the winter, luminarias line the wall, lighting the way for the faithful who trail through the village in the Las Posadas Christmas pageant. On any given Sunday, the church bell rings clear, calling villagers to mass—though you might not hear them through the double-thick adobe walls.

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FRONTIER CLASSIC

Spellbinding ranch beauty

In 1870, Theresa and Manley Chase traded almost a hundred wild mustangs they’d gathered in the mountains to land grant baron Lucien Maxwell for a thousand acres of land on the Ponil River east of Cimarron. By 1872, the hard-working young couple had built their home on land that sloped toward the Ponil with four rooms, a kitchen-dining room, parlor, and two bedrooms. The house eventually grew to 13 rooms. Within these timeworn, three-adobes-thick walls, the story of one of New Mexico’s leading ranching families—and much of the history of northern New Mexico, including the early development of the cattle industry and the Colfax County War—has unfurled.

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GLOBALIZED ADOBES

Su Casa’s request for a column from me on the “origins of New Mexico style” has struck a nerve. I’m afraid I can’t look backward without also pondering where we are going, as the twin-faced Roman god Janus was able to do.

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DEPARTMENTS ON THE PRINTED PAGE

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
by Vince DiGregory

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
by Charles C. Poling

MADE IN NEW MEXICO
by Emily Van Cleve

SU COCINA
by Cathy Robbins