home at last
points for style

Nearly a century after its inception, true Santa Fe style emerges when design collaborates with lifestyle.

By Christine Mather Photograph by Jack Parsons

This article first appeared in Summer 2009 Su Casa

What do you get if you cross a group of nerdy gringos with a bunch of crumbling adobes in a declining economy? Santa Fe style.

As we brace for the run up to the centenary of New Mexico statehood, it is also time to begin celebrating 100 years of Santa Fe style. The style’s roots go much further back in time than a mere hundred years, but awareness of the unique nature of New Mexico’s distinctive architectural heritage and the first official recognition of this heritage goes back to the year of statehood.

In 1912, Santa Fe’s very first City Planning Board had a scheme in play to “plan a residence and resort city.” This ambitious plan was to be “the first attempt to raise Santa Fe from the condition of a medieval village [but] . . . without destroying the city’s atmosphere of antiquity,” or so stated the board records from 1912. But first they had to figure out just exactly what this elusive “atmosphere of antiquity” consisted of and how it might best be both saved and replicated. This struggle faces every homeowner interested in either preserving a historic structure or building anew in the Santa Fe style. Besides striving for the mass, simplicity, and architectural details that form the bedrock of the style, they must also figure out how to live within these structures. This involves creating an interior atmosphere in keeping with the overall home, its setting, the heritage of the region, and their own particular needs and style—talk about challenging.

While the early planners careened about contacting planning dignitaries like Frederick Law Olmstead (the younger), searching for “ancient” street names, working on the water supply, developing a comprehensive city map, writing editorials to defend their new plans, and meeting endlessly, they were not yet developing interior details such as color, furnishings, art, and other elements. That was to come later from the art community, a group that recognized that the artistic heritage of the decorative arts equaled the artistic heritage embodied in the architecture—a rare and rather fabulous conjunction that gave Santa Fe style its most endearing and enduring qualities.

The founding parents of the infant style hit upon one method of figuring it all out by having an exhibition, followed by a contest to design homes in the “New-Old Santa Fe Style.” Sylvanus “Vay” Griswold Morley (1883–1948), the father of Mayan archaeology, was in charge of the exhibit and contest. Here was Santa Fe’s most fiery and dedicated advocate for preservation and the one most responsible for all that we now have come to call Santa Fe style, a phrase he christened. Being of the nerdy—that is, scholarly—persuasion, Morley set out to save Santa Fe by beating everyone over the head with all of its very special attributes—a banner I humbly strive to carry forward, head beating and all.

First, Morley saw that the basis for the style must rest on mud and mass. Without the large communal dirt houses of the Puebloan people grafted to the adobe architecture of both churches and residences of the Spanish occupiers, the style would never have come into being. As he put it, “The buildings appear to cling to mother earth and do not rear themselves in ineffectual competition with natural elevations.” This might be interpreted as a vote for long, low, and massive as well as a cranky invoking of the “no-showing-off clause.”

While very much a purist, Morley was able to recognize that what he described was, in fact, quite squat and oppressive, so he went on to say that this had to be tempered by the use of portales and balconies, vigas and canales, doors and windows, and plenty of carved wood. He was a total stickler for flat roofs and would tolerate the use of color as long as it was brown (OK, there are a few acceptable varieties, such as pale, buff, cream, dark, or reddish). He was quite enamored with what he liked to call the “Santa Fe capital,” the elaborated and carved wood at the top of a column, today often called a corbel. Morley disdained all things Californiated and loathed the arch as a result. Much of what Morley went on about has become a part of the style and the historic ordinance for the city.

All that was left out of this early formula was really rather gigantic. Just think about such practical things as bathrooms, kitchens, garages, screens, heating and cooling, window coverings, furniture, bedrooms, fountains, light fixtures, floors and floor coverings, colors (other than brown), storage, parking, signs, landscaping, walls, and streetscape. This intimidating, seemingly endless, and fluid list also defines an important part of the eventual Santa Fe style. But at the time of its inception, these elements were not even a glimmer in their daddy’s eyes, so to speak. All these important considerations had yet to be considered and had to be created along the way using the best judgment or consensus of Santa Feans, a group notoriously lacking in the ability to arrive at any aesthetic agreement without a lot of wrangling.

As it evolved, Santa Fe style seemed to rely upon three sources for figuring out how to come up with a style for these very important functional elements. One: they would adapt old objects or styles to new uses—for example, using tinwork styles with electric fixtures, Navajo textiles as rugs rather than as wearing blankets, Pueblo pottery turned into lamps and ashtrays, Indian drums turned into end tables. Two: they would look to neighboring cultures, states, or time periods and pick out what might be helpful—for example, Mexican tile and ironwork, colonial American window details, or California Mission style furniture. Or three: they would wing it and come up with things that just seemed right—most colors fall into this category, as do things like brick sidewalks and streets or exterior light fixtures, shutters, lots of furniture, and textiles with an ethnic look.

In addition, any number of things we slap on or in our houses or use every day have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Santa Fe, to say nothing of style. These things are, for the most part, invisible to us. For example, try to conjure up a Santa Fe style utility meter or trash can, television, computer, printer, sink, telephone, halogen light fixture, desk chair, or baseboard heater—best to just pretend they never happened or don’t really exist.

The original arbiters of all that was suitably Santa Fe took some real fliers themselves as they tried to formulate what should make the cut. The best example of near disasters is the design for an entry arch commemorating the end of the Santa Fe Trail on Santa Fe’s plaza. Fortunately, this hideous behemoth—shaped like the façade of the Alamo with a big cross perched on top—was never constructed. That Morley was so opposed to the use of blue window trim but championed this clunky arch just goes to show you that no single person should be the style police. The identity of a community belongs to the entire community, which means Santa Feans must guard their past and their style by fighting it out in the public forum, one light fixture and streetscape at a time. None of this is easy or cheap, and there are compromises and missteps all along the way, but “in all this brown the sun goes down” with a little bit of blue around the windows.

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.