Su Libro

Mexican inspiration

This summer we consider a handful of books about Mexican design from San Miguel de Allende, along with the enduring virtues of building with stone and timber.

By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Summer 2008 Su Casa

Casa San Miguel: Inspired Design and Decoration, by Annie Kelly, photography by Tim Street-Porter, foreword by Jorge Almada, Rizzoli, hardcover, $55.

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San Miguel’s Mexican Interiors, by Sandy Baum, Schiffer Publishing, hardcover, $14.95.

San Miguel’s Mexican Exteriors, by Sandy Baum, Schiffer Publishing, hardcover, $39.99.

The architecture and decorative arts found in picturesque San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, have long drawn admiring Americans, some for the full expatriate experience, others on design and collecting pilgrimages. The Spanish colonial town homes, rural haciendas, and Catholic churches share an attenuated cultural tradition with the once-isolated outposts of New Mexico. Like some cousins, the places look a lot alike—even the geography—but it’s as much fun to spot the differences as the similarities. And like cousins, they tend to have a good time when they get together.

Launching off the rhetorical question, “Who can remain immune to the charms of San Miguel?”, Casa San Miguel: Inspired Design and Decoration immerses the reader in a smattering of haciendas, villas, and rural town homes ranging from classic Colonial style to modern work.

Much like Santa Fe, San Miguel centers culturally on a historic district of tight dimensions, narrow roads, and dense medieval-urban neighborhoods, where walls, gardens, public plazas, and rooftops define the inhabited landscape while mountainous terrain lifts the far horizon. But throughout the colonial period and forward, Mexico had greater access to a wider variety of building materials, technology, and wealth than New Mexico, so you see less adobe and more stone, grillwork, extended ornamentation, and color. Paging through Casa San Miguel, by Annie Kelly with photography by Tim Street-Porter and a foreword by Jorge Almada, one senses a lingering elegance from an earlier period, tempered by something between a graceful decay and a savory mellowing.

After a brief foreword and an introduction that covers San Miguel’s history, culture, geography, and architecture, Casa San Miguel delves into its material organized in three parts: town homes, country homes, and design elements. In the first part, En El Pueblo, Kelly and Street-Porter take us through a handful of colorful high-density city houses ranging from 17th- and 18th-century mansions to a modern example by Ricardo Legorreta, one of Mexico’s leading contemporary architects. The smaller historic town homes cling to winding streets and sport enclosed courtyards dense with potted plants and rooftop patios offering beguiling views over the city, past the cathedral, and on to the distant mountains.

Out in the countryside—el campo—we find a mix of haciendas, the once-sprawling self-contained estates that functioned like villages in the pre-industrial, pre-revolution era, and ranchos, which were more rustic spreads like American ranches where wealthy landowners once raised sheep, cattle, and horses. The haciendas often included a scattering of structures: the main house, a church or chapel, a granary, a school, and so on, though not all this survives today in every case. One rancho, La Laja, reportedly earned favorite status of Mexico’s legendary architect Luis Barragán; it features a spectrum of stunning wall colors—vivid red, hot pink, brilliant yellow, stark white—that derive their shade from blends of mineral pigments and cactus juice. A vast colonnade, like an overscaled portal, rings a courtyard, its roof supported by Herculean columns.

The 19th-century rancho Jaral de Barrio has an entirely different aesthetic, with its crenellated towers, arches, Greek Revival columns, and grand shady loggias. Tile work and elaborate wallpaper, including cloth ceilings, dress up the rancho’s vast chambers. It’s a work in progress, undergoing restoration when the photos were taken. A third spread, Rancho de Capilla, evokes a Texas ranch’s rustic spaciousness, with its long views under a huge sky and its horsey vibe, like an updated All the Pretty Horses movie set.

The architectural elements section parses details from the area: color and decorative treatment for walls, courtyards, miscellaneous architectural details, kitchens, bathrooms, and the like.

From cover to cover, Casa San Miguel exudes a lovely atmosphere, as Street-Porter’s photographs imply a serene never-land where time itself seems to have dozed off on a dreamy afternoon.

Taking another approach, San Miguel’s Mexican Interiors and San Miguel’s Mexican Exteriors, two photo books by Sandy Baum, fall into that category of idea-generating page-flippers, the published equivalent of sitting down with a friend who just returned from an extended stay in Mexico and rifling through a stack of snapshots of varying quality and interest. Their usefulness derives from the sheer volume and variety of subjects—and these books are useful indeed. The basic format is brief text, lots of pictures, and interpretive captions.

Planning a kitchen remodel? Here you go: Talavera tile over Saltillo flooring; modern shiny yellow tile walls; startling green, turquoise, and pink walls and cabinetry; cobalt, rustic, country, urban. Want to perk up the bedroom? Baum shows you color, of course, highly styled beds, a mosaic faux-painted headboard, a cozy, almost Santa Fe style fireplace, canopy beds, iron beds, hand-carved beds, luxury, whimsy, glamour . . . How about light fixtures? You’ll find iron chandeliers, brass sconces, punched tin lanterns, wall hangers, coach lights, garden path lights.

And so it goes, throughout the home, from doors and nichos to bathrooms and dining rooms, ceilings and floors to stairways and art. You could try this, you could try that, or you could think of a third idea.

For whatever reason, Mexican Exteriors, at a bit more than 8 inches by 10 inches, stands at twice the trim size of Mexican Interiors—thus the price difference and bigger play for the photos. Once again, you won’t read this book so much as flip its pages in a cascade of vivid imagery, some of the photos quite pleasing, others disappointingly grainy, underexposed, or blurry. That won’t stop you from finding things you like, though.

Stone Designs for the Home, by John T. Morris with Candace Walsh, photographs by Robert Reck, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, hardcover, $34.95.

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Stoneview: How to Build an Eco-Friendly Little Guesthouse, by Rob Roy, New Society Publishers, paperback, $25.95.

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The feel of natural building materials continues to lure home builders and buyers even as more and more high-tech materials enter the marketplace. Wood, adobe, stone—they all remind us of a connection to the earth, the coziness of a cave, the durability of a fortress, even. Around here, stonework appears in a variety of forms, from cultured stone—a man-made product—to flag floors to cobbled wainscoting on a strawbale home. Sometimes we see glued-on veneers that imitate stacked stone, sometimes we see artful work emulating the incredible intricacy of Chaco Canyon masonry. We see stone lending massive presence to a towering entry door, rustic elegance to a garden wall, elemental rootedness to a classic fireplace. Timber frames hold up roof and walls for strawbale and straw-clay homes and sometimes, as in Rob Roy’s Stoneview guest house in upstate New York, cordwood masonry walls.

In Stone Designs for the Home, Santa Fe–area stonemason John T. Morris presents a portfolio of his work on estates ranging in scale from the merely grand to the rustic-palatial. While the book has the aura of a promotional project, Morris’ stonework is truly amazing and revealingly photographed by
Su Casa contributor Robert Reck.

Morris practices the traditional art of shaping stone entirely by hand with hammer and chisel—no power tools. (Who needs the noise and dust? It ruins the creative vibe.) As an East Coast transplant to Santa Fe, he picked up the trade almost by accident, abandoning his ambition of becoming a rock star (how’s that for irony?) when the responsibilities of supporting a family intruded into the dream.

After watching a master mason painstakingly select stones and build a wall, Morris went from intrigued to obsessed, it seems, soon apprenticing with Cuyamungue Stone Company, where he worked for a dozen years before breaking out with his own company, New Mexico Stone. In Stone Designs, Morris presents his work less as a building trade than as a fine art, suggesting that the walls and floors, towers and paths that people take for granted deserve a higher level of appreciation. If you’ve ever tried to stack even the most rudimentary of stone walls, then you know it’s nowhere near as easy as it looks. And it’s worth doing right. “Bad stonework sticks out,” Morris says, “but stonework done well can seem inevitable.”

That’s probably part of its appeal. And whether you look at Morris’ monumental, sprawling, terraced walls, arched doorways, or intricately fitted flag floors, his work indeed has the casual grace of a natural outcrop, not an artificial construct. And his work covers quite a wide range, from rectangular carved block in a “Roman bath” (with stone-veneered drawers that seem to vanish into the wall when closed) to a circular torreón to a Chaco-masonry bathroom where the strata of stacked stone walls look authentically ancestral-Puebloan. In many cases, the stone looks—or actually is—structural, raising Morris’ masonry beyond the glued-on veneer style that often passes for stonework. And you can’t help but respect this craftsman who chips by hand a flagstone into place rather than grinding away with a power tool to make it fit. Work done at that level creates its own aesthetic.

If you’re mad about stone—and a tour of fresh-built New Mexico homes suggests that many of you are—then you’ll want this book. It’ll give you a sense of what’s possible at the hands of a master mason.

Despite its title, Stoneview: How to Build an Eco-Friendly Little Guesthouse focuses more on wood than stone. Author Rob Roy, his wife, Juki, and various students built this little cabin from cordwood walls.

That’s right, cordwood: in this case, logs cut to firewood width, stacked unsplit in concrete mortar, and held together by an octagonal timber-frame structure under a living roof that looks like a minimeadow of grasses and chives. Oh, yeah, and it cost less than $6,000.

If you’ve got a place in the mountains with acres and acres of overgrown scrub ponderosa pine just begging to be thinned (fire hazard, you know), you might consider cordwood masonry walls—maybe it’s a better use of the wood than releasing its carbon dioxide up your chimney. Plus, it looks cool: at the wall’s exterior the logs appear in cross-section, varying-diameter circles floating in gray concrete mortar. Mix in a few bottles so they show end-on, and you’ve got a variegated freeform polka-dot pattern that looks like nothing else in the county, guaranteed.

Written as something of a how-to for experienced builders, Stoneview documents Roy’s experiment in building an octagonal cordwood building. Illustrations and photos accompany the clearly narrated text explaining every step in the project. Chapters cover site preparation, pouring the floating concrete slab on packed sand, timber framing, creating the lightweight living roof, and stacking the cordwood/masonry walls themselves. Roy also explains a basic plumbing system that features a “humanure” composting toilet. Plans, materials lists, and cost breakouts complete the book. If you’re tempted to undertake a project like this for yourself and you’ve done some building, Stoneview might be all you need to get started on a low-tech three-season (uninsulated) house that’s so green you could eat the roof—or your horse could.