A real beauty in Tesuque on the market
7/5/2009
This is a great house and property, boasting a perfect blending of simplicity and luxury. Builder Doug McDowell and architect Ed Boniface did the main house in Northern New Mexico style, with a pitched, metal roof, long portales, and very nice lines.
The floors in the common areas of the home were laid with pavers the original owner, Gail Factor, purchased at the Paris flea market. In the bedrooms, the floors are wide-plank wood harvested from an old, New England farmhouse.
There are stunning, hand-plastered interior walls throughout, and coved-plaster ceilings in the bedrooms, the shining plaster contrasting with dark ceiling beams.
The property address is 1434-A Bishop's Lodge Road, which is about a quarter of a mile south of Shidoni Foundry & Galleries.
The main residence is 5,758 square feet. Also on the property are a guest house of 1,440 square feet, a studio of 1,286 square feet, and a caretakers' residence of 880 square feet.
The 2.8-acre site possesses a parklike appearance. Mature trees shade large areas on the beautiful lawns — not vast flat areas of turf, but hilly and intimate. There is a mature rose garden and an entry courtyard, a patchwork of flagstones and creeping thyme, bordered with iris and poppies, all under old sycamore trees.
In front of the guest house and studio, a cute trellis-gate, covered with Virginia creeper and honeysuckle, leads into a fenced garden plot. This is an informal parterre, with eight plank-bordered planters filled with colorful ice plants and snapdragons, a few vegetables, and lots of strawberries. Around the perimeter are iris, poppies, and Sedum "Autumn Joy."
The house was inspired by Betty Stewart, whose last home was adjacent to this project. The houses designed and built by Stewart, who died in 1994, are characterized by double-adobe walls, pitched tin roofs, old-brick floors, Mexican lantern fixtures, and high-gloss "gauging plaster" on interior walls. She reportedly enforced her opinion that Santa Fe homes shouldn't be too straight, that they should have a hand-made look, by forbidding her crews from using chalk lines or plumb bobs.
The main residence, guest house, and studio at 1434-A Bishop's Lodge Road are all adobe. In the main house, windows set at the outside of the openings in the thick adobe walls, yielding inside sills that are up to 24 inches deep.
A latticed skylight admits filtered light into the foyer, a space ornamented by a border of brick "coping" high up on the walls. The living room, kitchen, and study have peaked, truss-beam ceilings. All three rooms are equipped with fireplaces, as are the dining room and study; there is also one fireplace each in the guest house, studio, and caretakers' abode.
In the master bathroom are a deep spa tub and a glass-doored, tiled shower. Adjacent is a changing room that includes a zinc countertop and a secondary basin before a mirror in a stamped-tin frame.
The kitchen is outfitted with lots of beautiful cabinets, a Sub Zero refrigerator paneled with the same wood, and a hefty, luxurious Aga stove. Work surfaces, including on a long island, are variously wood, stone, and tile. The pantry includes a full fridge, wine cooler, and icemaker.
The studio, a practical, barnlike space with cathedral ceiling, is well-lit from row of windows in the long shed dormer.
The property is served by a pre-moratorium well.
Broker Tim Van Camp, who is listing the property with Ray Rush, said that when the home was built in 1994, it was outfitted with Entran II radiant-heat tubing in the floor slab. That particular model was subject to leak failures, and was the subject of a class-action suit on the part of homeowners around the country. Here, even though the Entran didn't fail, the house was retrofitted with an efficient, state-of-the-art forced-air heating/refrigerated-air system. Treated air is delivered via unobtrusive ceiling vents.
"This house was priced at $5.2 million a few years ago and now it's $3,895,000, so the owners are aggressively seeking offers," Van Camp said. Contact Rush or Van Camp at Sotheby's International Realty.