Home at Last
a dreamy little home
New Mexican planners brought Southwest style into the suburban
mainstream early in the 20th century, keeping alive a legacy that
continues to shape our communities today.
Cozy Santa Fe style homes like this one provided affordable family housing and reinforced the city’s signature architectural design.
This article first appeared in Summer 2007 Su Casa
Two bedrooms, one bath, kitchen with “range, ice, and dinette,” living room, a few closets, a one-car garage, portal—BAM!—the complete and compact dream house of 1938 New Mexico. The one-bedroom model could save you a bundle, and you had a choice between hollow tile or adobe for the construction. Best of all, there was money to borrow so contractors, banks, and suppliers could blissfully advertise: “Build now . . . the Federal Housing Act makes it possible. Live in a home that is modern and convenient. Do not deny yourself and your family the satisfaction, comfort, and happiness that come of living in your own home.” New Mexico had never benefited from mass housing trends, such as the mail order madness of Sears and Roebuck homes that could be unloaded piece by (thousands of) piece off a rail car. The state was finally poised to have affordable housing for a citizenry that had long relied on owner-built homes.
More than 20 years earlier, architects and planners laid the foundation for New Mexico to have its own style of housing. City-sponsored competitions hoped to head off the deplorable effects of brick and stick bungalows and other equally insidious invasions. Sylvanus Morley, best known as the father of Mayan archaeology, wrote a prescient article in 1915 that spelled out in detail architectural history and influences, suggested corbel designs, illustrated winning home models, proposed the phrase “Santa Fe style,” showed before and after “Santa Fe treatment” photographs of the Palace of the Governors, and scolded those who attempted to bring non-New Mexican influences into the City Different: “However appropriate California Mission Architecture might be for California, it was hardly the ‘correct thing’ for New Mexico. . . .” As early as 1912, the stage was being set for a New Mexican city’s transformation from Anytown U.S.A. to a destination, romantic, tourist town. As part of this effort, streets were renamed from such prosaic monikers as Telegraph Road to Camino del Monte Sol, or Manhattan Avenue to Acequia Madre. My own neighborhood was scheduled to go from small farming to quaint lanes with small adobe homes, a fate that succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of the plan’s framers. Public buildings and spaces were particularly targeted in this process of transformation as domestic architecture was taken in hand by individuals, especially artists. While individual homes were set forth as showplaces of the Santa Fe style or given the Santa Fe treatment, it was hardly the transformation or development of entire communities and neighborhoods that would occur later.
As for interior decoration, the innovators during the teens of the 20th century were a bit less clear. “It is not the purpose of this article to indicate how Santa Fe houses should be furnished interiorly,” Morley writes. But then he went on to provide a hint: “In general the writer believes they should be of that much used but oft abused style known as Mission.” And finally, he renders a rather snotty judgment: “The impropriety of French period furniture or even Sheraton or Adam in rooms with unhewn timber ceilings is too obvious to require comment.” In other words, the instigators didn’t have much of a clue how to furnish the houses that they were proposing. All of this would have to wait for the hard times that were ahead and the federal government’s response. While New Mexico, as a largely rural, impoverished state, escaped the first effects of the Great Depression, the marginal economic circumstances of the population soon pushed the region over the edge. Between the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, the arts community led the charge in the revival of craft as a means of economic development through workshops and sales venues all aimed at home decoration. This period was to do for New Mexican home interiors what the previous decade had set forth for exteriors—to codify examples of how a “contemporary” home could be decorated in a New Mexican style.
By 1934, when the National Housing Act was passed during the Great Depression, New Mexico was set to provide its population for the first time with plans for homes, inside and out, that would be unique to the region. Builders and architects set forth house plan books that detailed how to do it all, right down to the tin light fixture in the hallway. “Here the beautiful things of yesterday are adapted to today’s living conditions—and your comforts—by the Southwest’s finest craftsmen,” proclaims a 1938 advertisement in New Mexico Magazine. The ad goes on: “Draperies, Tinwork, Lanterns and Sconces, Hand-Woven Rugs, Hand-Blocked Linens, Goat Skin Lamp Shades, Andirons, and Fireplace Screens,” which were all to provide “Complete Furnishings for the Entire Home.” It was to be a staggering transformation for New Mexico from rural, owner-built homes to planned neighborhoods with suggestions for everything from portal design to lamp shades.
A number of these home designs and community transformations actually came into being. For example, the community of Bosque Farms was part of a land purchase lottery so those devastated by the Dust Bowl might have an opportunity to rebuild their lives through the purchase of land and the construction of homes—following the precepts of the simple plans of homes built in a New Mexican style. As a result about 42 families arrived to be part of both a rural initiative and a planned community. But for the most part, all of this would be postponed while every skilled worker in America joined the war effort as the period of craft revival and Depression-era building came to a sudden end.
What happened after the war would make all that came before seem like a mere practice run for what was to follow. The Federal Housing Administration, which was designed to help lift the country out of poverty and provide housing, was poised to supply the money needed to fill the demand for housing after the war. New Mexico, with its pivotal role in the war effort, was part of this explosive growth of new home ownership that occurred throughout the country. My parents bought their first car, a green Chevy, and brand-new Cape Cod style home in York, Pennsylvania, when my father returned from three years in a tent, then finished a graduate degree thanks to the GI Bill, and started what was to become his career. Heady and intense times for young parents like my folks who, in their case, left far behind them both rural and emigrant life in Ohio. Their story of service, education, hard work, and wealth accumulation—the Greatest Generation—had as one of its greatest gifts the development of standardized housing. Despite its detractors and the sometimes unstylish results, the formation of tract housing, planned neighborhoods, and commercial home development was to bring individual families—accompanied by their automobiles—out of substandard housing and into the relative comforts of the suburbs. It was left to their children to recognize and struggle with the unintended consequences of these volcanic changes.
By the 1950s, New Mexico had developed new neighborhoods focused on universities, city centers, schools, churches, military installations, airports, research, and manufacturing centers. Thousands of these homes are direct descendants of the small, snug Santa Fe style homes dreamed up at the beginning of the 20th century and first brought into production in the 1930s. The homes had two bedrooms and one bath, a one-car garage, flat roof—perhaps a trace of a viga or corbel or a corner fireplace—and were stuccoed to resemble adobe. One of my young colleagues was lucky to find one such vintage Stamm home in Santa Fe, a house that 50 years later still serves as a starter home for another generation of first-time buyers. Planned communities continue to fill mesas, foothills, and plains, “infill” old neighborhoods, and sprout up along highways. While some areas look as if they have been transplanted wholesale from California—an outcome that would, no doubt, upset those early planners—the majority of these new communities proudly proclaim their New Mexican architectural heritage. A dream come true.
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.