The Santa Fe House

Exploring beautiful homes in the southwest and drawing up on the traditional elements of Native America - fire, earth, air and water. This books highlights the distinctive details particular to every home that is visited.

Now in paperback comes an exploration of the origins and current manifestations of style in Santa Fe, from the ancient inspiration of the Canyon de Chelly to the architectural innovations of Frank Lloyd Wright and his contemporaries. 450 illustrations, 220 in color.

In 1821 William Becknell and five comrades traveled from Franklin, Missouri to Santa Fe, New Mexico, then the northern provincial capital of New Spain, the first Americans to do so legally. And thus was born the Santa Fe Trail, a nine hundred mile long road of commerce to a foreign land. During New Spain’s reign, foreign trade had been forbidden, but that changed when Mexico wrested control from the European empire in 1821. Never an active immigrant highway, selling merchandise to goods-starved Mexican residents and returning revenue to economically starved Missouri was the Trail’s primary purpose. During the formative years but one town, San Miguel del Vado, forty miles east of Santa Fe, existed along the Trail. By the mid-1840s Mexican merchants were dominant, and their children were sent to American schools. The Mexican-American war erupted in 1846, and Brigadier General Stephen Kearny led the Army of the West into battle along the Trail. The victorious United States acquired much of the southwest, from Texas to California. This changed the nature of the Trail when the many military forts that were built to secure the peace required provisions. During this period the trailhead gradually moved west as the railroad chugged in. In 1880 the railroad reached Lamy, New Mexico, twenty miles south of Santa Fe, and there the Trail died. The present work leads the reader along the Trail, describing specific sites and the nature of the area surrounding each, and the author’s experiences visiting them.

First survey of modernist and contemporary architecture and interiors in the richly layered architectural history of Santa Fe Santa Fe Modern reveals the high desert landscape as an ideal setting for bold, abstracted forms of modernist houses. Wide swaths of glass, deep-set portals, long porches, and courtyards allow vistas, color, and light to become integral parts of the very being of a house, emboldening a way to experience a personal connection to the desert landscape. The architects featured draw from the New Mexican architectural heritage--they use ancient materials such as adobe in combination with steel and glass, and they apply this language to the proportions and demands exacted by today's world. The houses they have designed are confident examples of architecture that is particular to the New Mexico landscape and climate, and yet simultaneously evoke the rigorous expressions of modernism. The vigor and the allure of modern art and architecture hearten each other in a way that is visible and exciting, and this book demonstrates the synergistic relationship between art, architecture, and the land.

Debunks the great tourist myth, and explains how the Santa Fe architectural and design style, so popular with millions of visitors today, was consciously created by Anglos in the early 20th century.

Few of the great overland highways of America have known such a wealth of color and romance as that which surrounded the Santa Fé Trail. For over four centuries the dust-gray and muddy-red trail felt the moccasined tread of Comanches, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes. These soft footfalls were replaced by the bold harsh clang of the armored conqueror, Coronado, and by a host of Spanish explorers and soldiers seeking the gold of fabled Quivira. Black and brown-robed priests, armed only with the cross, were followed in turn by bearded buckskin-clad fur traders and mountain men, by canny Indian traders, and lean, weather-beaten drovers with great herds of long-horned cattle. [...] The story dictated in such vivid detail by Marian Sloan Russell is a unique and valuable eyewitness account by a sensitive, intelligent girl who grew to maturity on the kaleidoscopic Santa Fé Trail. “Maid Marian,” as she was known by the freighters and soldiers, made five round-trip crossings of the trail before settling down to live her adult life along its deeply rutted traces. —From Foreword “When it was first published in 1954, Marian Russell’s Land of Enchantment was praised as an outstanding memoir of life on the Santa Fe Trail...Now readers everywhere can enjoy Mrs. Russell’s recollections,... And those readers will discover that Mrs. Russell described much more than just life on the Trail. Indeed her memoirs cover virtually every aspect of life in the West...—Southwest Review “These memoirs reveal a strong, energetic woman whose perceptions of old Santa Fe and pioneer life on the trail paint a vivid picture of the nineteenth-century West. The unusual and exact details which Marian Russell recalls make her story enthrallingly real.”—American West

Insiders' Guide to Santa Fe is the essential source for in-depth travel and relocation information to this beautiful New Mexico city. Written by a local (and true insider), it offers a personal and practical perspective of Sante Fe and its surrounding environs.