D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
September 2005
D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
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Painted Desert
By Mary Anne Ciancia
No one wonders why old adobes fit so perfectly into their landscape: They're made of it. But for those of us who have arrived lately to the desert, the ideal of a house that intimately belongs to its surroundings is perhaps a metaphor for the relationship you hope to have with the place you will now call home. The "Design Committee" of our email is probably too fancy a term for Destre and the rest of the people who work at the development office of the ranch where we bought our property back in 2001. In fact, "development" has a completely different meaning back east where, over the past 25 years, huge construction companies have converted the dairy farms of my western New Jersey county into new Levittowns. Like the Malvina Reynolds song, the houses are "all made just the same," but the "ticky-tacky" these days is more likely to be marble and teak, and the "little boxes," at 5,000 or 6,000 square feet, overwhelm their acre-and-a-half lots. At 200 or 300 homes per project, the landscape disappears into them.
The 35,000-acre ranch in Sierra County, New Mexico, where we own our 60 acres, is a conservation property, and part of the covenants that homeowners sign is the commitment to confine their civilizing to a three-acre home site so as to leave the rest wild. Obviously all of us homeowners had bought into the importance of preserving the land, but one's home is also an expression of one's self. I suppose that the tension between the self-expression inherent in building a new home and the community values of the ranch as a whole precipitated the design committee and their approval of architecture and colors. Last summer, preparing to begin our construction and conceding that a true adobe was beyond our means, we settled on the pueblo style and began to look for just the right color that would blend a house with our personality into a piece of land with a character of its own. The ranch already presented a spectrum of solutions. Our future neighbors, Ted and Heidi, for example, were among the first to build, and their house, to our north, was on the self-expressive end of the scale. We saw it on our second trip west when their construction was newly finished. We'd been on the ranch for the long weekend of the annual barbecue, anxious to meet all the folks who would be our future community. We were surprised to learn that among the first residents was another couple from New Jersey. When someone mentioned that local artists had worked on their home, we absolutely had to see it before going back east. How could we miss that? In fact, you couldn't miss it. Turning up the dirt road and cresting the little hill, there arose before us a house the color of a rose--a deep red rose. With a violet shed roof. Jim took his eyes off the road to look for my reaction. "I'd thought more like earth tones," he said. I replied, "You remember the Painted Desert. . . ?" No doubt that one image, one identity, of New Mexico is artistic, bold and flamboyant. But we are not artists. A rose-colored house we could admire, but not emulate. The other end of the spectrum is the house of our neighbors to the south, Cindy and Budd. Last spring, the exterior stucco on their house was in its gray scratch coat, a cement-colored rectangle visible for miles. On our next trip, as we came over Horseshoe Pass into the valley, we looked for the finished house against the east slope of the mountain--but it wasn't there anymore. Jim stopped the car at a vantage point and we looked again. Gone. Only lower and closer did we finally see it, and then, only the dark square of the windows--too straight and regular for nature--gave the house away. "What color is your stucco?" we asked them later. "Oh, it's called Tumbleweed," Cindy replied, cheerily puttering around her new kitchen. We looked up "Tumbleweed" later. Not a color Crayola knows--not really brown or green or yellow but somewhere in the midst of the three, yet somehow perfectly the sand and the grasses and the color of the light on the hillside. But it felt a little too quiet for us. Did we come west to maintain our same old suburban New Jersey reserve?
Last August's visit was especially to meet with our builder to discuss design choices. We and our builder, Steve, drove around Las Cruces to look at tile for the floors, wood for the ceilings, kitchen cabinets, lighting and plumbing fixtures and, yes, stucco colors. After a long day of dropping in on the construction-trade supply houses that line the dusty roads on the outskirts of town, we settled down in our hotel room and began to peruse the color palettes of the El Rey Stucco Company. El Rey had a tri-fold brochure with 18 one-by-one-inch color squares on each of the three panels: grayish stone colors on the left, pastels in the center, earth tones on the right. We had already seen the actual color that spoke to us--the color of the stucco of the White Sands Visitor Center out towards Alamogordo--the color of stucco on the Rock Hound State Park Museum down in Deming. But what color is it on the little one-inch squares pasted to the tagboard brochure? "It's the Taos," I said, confidently pointing to the lower-right-hand-corner swatch. "Too red," Jim countered. "I think it's more like Tierra." "Tierra looks a little bland to me." I continued to Steve, "We want to blend--" "--but still be a little, well, distinctive," Jim finished my thought. "What do you think is the right color for us?" I asked. Steve smiled. Originally a Californian, New Mexico is his chosen place. He has been here for years. The backcountry, where we are building now, he has hiked and hunted and loved. He built several of our neighbors' houses. His is the practiced local eye that we trust. Steve did not suggest the "right" color. "Why don't you look for a building with a color you like here in Las Cruces and match it up?"
Rolling up State Route 70, also known as Main Street, we spotted the very thing needed: 50 or more little pueblo ranch houses closely quartered on the usual curvy residential roads and cul-de-sacs of a new city neighborhood--a rainbow of stuccoes like a Belgian chocolate assortment. We turned in the entry road and cruised down its peaceful streets. Of course, no one was home at this time of day--mid-morning--except for the retired guy sitting shirtless in his nylon web lounge chair in the yard of the corner house. He watched us go by. I raised my hand in greeting but only after mentally confirming that we were out west. Back home, on the New Jersey Turnpike, any movement of your hands above your lap is likely to be interpreted as confrontational. Even on the back roads of our semi-rural county on the Delaware River, I have startled people with a casual salute transplanted from the west. Taken by surprise, they crane their necks after me trying to recognize the stranger behind the wheel — for there only someone you know would wave at you. But here, the returning wave of the shirtless Las Cruces gentleman on his front lawn was easy and unhesitant, just recognizing a fellow traveler on life's highway. We stopped the car next to a likely looking russet-colored ranch. Jim turned off the engine but left the radio on, listening to a news story that had grabbed his attention. The street was otherwise quiet. No one out and about. That should have been good, but I began to have my first misgivings. "Go ahead," Jim urged me out the door. I walked up to the house, color chart at ready, wondering what I looked like to the casual observer--or the shirtless guy. I pressed the brochure up against the stucco wall and looked for the best match. Suddenly a dog began to bark inside the house. A big dog with a big basso bark. I jumped. I looked back at Jim. He was fiddling with the radio knob. A Chihuahua added a frenetic soprano next door, and then some other dog a block over decided to join the chorus. In another minute the entire neighborhood would be howling like the string section at a junior high school concert. I jumped back into the car. Jim had muffled the barking by turning up the volume on the news. "Go! Go!" I shouted at him. Unperturbed, he peered at me quizzically. "So what color was it?" "Cactus Flower--maybe Pecos--just GO!" As we pulled away, I checked the side mirror for a pursuing pack of canines, but I saw only the shirtless man receding, fanning himself with his magazine.
Back in the commercial area of town: "That one?" I asked, pointing at the Alamo-like facade of the local Arby's as we roll along Sepulveda Drive. "Not enough red in it. Maybe that one. See the bank over there?" We pulled into the parking lot. "Get the palette," he said. I got out, colors in hand. This time he joined me as I held up the brochure to the rough wall of the fake bell tower in the bank's front lot. "It's hard to tell," I complained to him while he too studied the correspondences. We seemed to have made a discovery about the nature of stucco: It has texture. The unevenness complicates the color so that there are two or even three shades in the mix. "It could be Rio Bravo, but if the sun is shining on it, it looks like Clay!" We glided next into the parking lot of a Marriott hotel, a beautiful burnt-sienna palace. We both got out and walked up and down the portico. "Very nice! Let me have the brochure," he said. We walked around to the side where we would be less obvious (but a whole lot more suspicious?) holding a piece of cardboard against a hotel wall. I had a sudden inspiration, and I picked up a small stone as Jim walked on toward a sunny spot. I glanced around. For a brief moment I wondered if anyone was on the lookout for terrorists. The moment passed--a New York moment? Silly of me. We looked like exactly what we are: an older Anglo couple, probably tourists doing some eccentric tourist thing. People on the lookout here are on the Border Patrol--trim, straight-backed men who give us nary a second glance at they wave us through the checkpoint. We don't fit the profile of illegal immigrants. I hadn't thought much until that very moment about illegal immigrants, and though anyone who knows me has been treated to my political opinions, I realized: I have no position on an issue that people care about passionately in this place that will be my new home. It has never seemed immediate enough for me to form an opin I was concentrating on my unformed opinion and my little stone when I was interrupted. "What the heck are you doing?!" "I'm trying to pry a bit of the stucco off the wall!" I retorted. "Ha!" Holding up a pinched crumb of colored concrete, "Taos!" I cried triumphantly and set it right on top of the sample square, where it blended perfectly. Jim moved the little particle onto the Tierra sample. Immediately it transformed itself so that it looked like a perfect morsel of Tierra.
We talked to Steve from our hotel that evening. "We're having some trouble with the El Rey stucco colors. The swatches are so small--" "Don't worry about it," Steve said. "You'll find something that suits you. By the way, we'll be using Sto for your place anyway, not El Rey." We had lost the Sto brochure among the myriad product flyers that had been dragged back to our hotel room. In the morning we tossed the room like a pair of burglars, but it just wasn't anywhere. We thought, however, that we could remember where the Sto dealer was located. Into the car! "Over there?" "No, I remember that it was next to the place where we saw the corbels." I was beginning to learn the architectural terms of our new home. "That's the next street. Turn here." The warehouse looked like every other warehouse on this industrial thoroughfare, but there was something, we thought, a little familiar about the chain-link fence. We were right! The young woman at the desk handed over a brochure for Sto products. She yelled in Spanish to the guys in backroom and I was tickled to catch the gist of her remarks even though my university Spanish is more than 30 years old. What fun it would be to reacquire that skill! I wanted to respond with "Gracias," just to try it out, but I knew that for the meantime, that would be a pretentious as my trying to use Heidi and Ted's colors. Maybe by next year. . . . "Thank you," Jim told her. He opened the color card--more colors and even smaller patches. "You know, this is great, but would you happen to have anything with a larger sample swatch?" "Well, this one is a little bigger." She gave us the El Rey brochure. "All our colors are available in the El Rey designations, too. . . ." "Want to go look for buildings?" I asked tiredly as we got back into the car. "Why don't we wait till we get up to the ranch and see what the rocks look like?"
The rocks were our touchstone. The house was to be built at the mouth of a small canyon beside an arroyo. As the arroyo cuts though the outcropping of rocks on the mountain, a natural wall forms behind our house site. The exposed rocks are the dramatic backdrop. The house color was intended to echo their color. On the ranch, we stayed at the home of our closest neighbors, Marge and Tom, who look down from their hilltop into our canyon. We had never met them prior to their building on the tract next to ours. In fact, we introduced ourselves to Tom and Marge in an email: "coming out for the annual ranch barbecue. . . going to look at our property. . . love to meet you. . . ." They invited us--sight unseen--to stay with them instead of getting a hotel. "Are you sure?" I wrote back. (My eastern sensibilities couldn't quite wrap my head around this invitation--this unexpected friendliness--this western hospitality?) "Sure. Why not?" Marge replied. Together we looked down from their hilltop at our canyon. I held the stucco brochure in front of me at arm's length pointed at the rocks, and I squinted one eye to see which color square best matched the background. Marge, a retired graphic artist and photographer, stood behind me. "Vega," she said, with a wink of her well-trained eye. "Definitely." And as she strolled back under the portales, she added, "But it all depends on the light in which you see it."
So we took a little time: a meditation in the morning when the orange sunrise poured into the canyon, a walk to the rocks at midday when the sky's brilliance bleached the hillside, a musing at evening when the shadows sueded the whole line of the Sibley Mountains. Marge was right. Over time, every color was there in some part of earth or sky. And whatever we chose, time and light would blend us into the landscape. Finally we came to a decision. Before we traveled back east, we had to give Steve a call. "We have our stucco color," we told him. "We'd like you to use Adobe Brown." "Funny you should pick that, " Steve replied, "because. . . ."
Photo by Marge Myers
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