Features

Getting Graphic

Gayle and Chuck Monahan were supposed to be only thinking about moving from California last March when they visited a friend in the City Different. And enlisting a realtor to show them a few properties was only supposed to give them a sense of the place. They were driving through La Mirada, just east of Las Campanas, when they spotted a bold, angular house bathed in colors of ochre and moss. “We both said, ‘Can we look at that?’” Gayle recalls, laughing. As fate would have it, developer Michael Hurlocker just happened to be in the driveway that fortuitous day, and gave the couple a tour. “As soon as we walked in, I could see the writing on the walls,” she says. “We just fell in love with it.”

     The Monahans toured the house again on the way to the airport, flew back two weeks later for one more walkthrough, then put their Laguna Beach, California, home on the market—a sure sign they were about to make the move. This past June, they unpacked their furnishings and began settling into a steady routine of telecommuting (he’s an international supplier of organic foods, she a {xxxxxx}) and stupendous sunsets enjoyed from the cozy, contemporary confines of their new Santa Fe home. The hook: architect Robert Zachry’s fusion of organic and modern, in which he pairs natural elements like stone and wood with classic lines and a timeless sensibility in a minimalist treatment of Santa Fe style.

     “I’d never lived in an architecturally designed house, where thought is given to the entire concept,” says Chuck, even though the couple’s remodel of a former home in Portland, Oregon, was featured in Better Homes & Gardens. “There’s something to be said about living in a space where thought has been given to the angles—the ratios, the way the light hits at different times of day, and then carrying that throughout—that helps with serenity. You find yourself relaxed and centered,” he explains. “There is a symmetry, like with the pyramids, that works on you, on your biorhythms and your emotional state.”

     The couple had long admired the work of California architect Mark Singer, whose work Gail describes as “very modern in a sense, but not a period modern, like ’50s modern or ’60s modern, but organically modern in a primitive way. … We loved his work, and in our fantasy, we thought, if we could ever have a Mark Singer house in California, we would, but that wasn’t going to happen. The minute we walked into this house, it embodied so many of those ‘in a perfect world’ things.”

     “My approach is to take indigenous architecture and simplify it enough that it becomes modern,” says Zachry, a down-to-earth architect who’s been honing his signature aesthetic of shadow, line, and light here since the 1980s. A traditional mud floor is updated through coffee-colored poured concrete. Canales and beams are rendered in steel that weathers to an iron-specked, earthy patina. Honey-colored walls are hard-troweled and beeswax-finished. Fireplaces, portals, exposed-beam ceilings, and skylights all echo familiar Northern New Mexico touches. “Every element is exactly the same, just structured differently,” Gayle says.

      For visual interest, a curving wall establishes the front of the house, beginning near the driveway with an array of 12 square openings that frame the Jemez mountains. The wall then travels through the front portal as the support wall, continues on through the master bedroom, and re-emerges on the home’s north side, keeping a traditional, rough stucco coat throughout. Similarly, a squared, yarrow-colored arch spans the driveway—functioning both as an introductory statement of style and a clever shield for an otherwise street view of the three-car garage—and continues through the middle of the house, emerging on the west side of a private garden outside the master bath. Other touches, such as a tempered-glass front door, immense sliding glass doors that disappear into the walls of the great room, and a woven-steel wall reminiscent of 1950s bentwood fencing, provide contemporary updating. “It’s modern, but it couldn’t be warmer,” Gayle says.

      Other touches include an angular fireplace in the living room that is repeated on a smaller scale on the front portal and in the master bedroom. Flat steel bars run outside of the master bedroom window are set just above and below eye level in order to frame the view of the Jemez while providing shade relief from the setting sun. (The theme is continued across the room in recessed bookshelves next to the window.) A huge master bath features alternating vertical strips of glass and plastered fins that open to a private garden separating the bath from the guest suite.

      In the kitchen, which has its own cozy eating nook and portal, two sets of cabinets are covered with opaque glass and hung over windows to let light filter through. A granite countertop separating the kitchen from the den—a favorite gathering spot with wonderful western views—gently curves on the same radius as the front portal wall. And the powder room, a dramatic space with stone tile on the walls, a granite countertop, and a glass-bowl basin, features a vertical column of glass bricks that rises to a skylight and extends the line of light through the front of the kitchen. Unobtrusive maple cabinets are thoughtfully placed throughout.

      “Contemporary reflects a changing attitude toward design here,” says Michael Hurlocker, who’s partnered with Zachry for almost 20 years. “These are the same traditional materials, just cleaned up,” he says. “They’re still the long, low horizontal masses,” only more fun, he adds, “because you’re not limited to that palette and list of materials.” And the choice of color scheme, Hurlocker argues—the plums, dark browns, and sunflower yellows created by local color consultant Edy Keeler, of Core Value, Inc.—are more environmentally friendly from a distance than the beige adobes that dot the landscape. “Those actually stand out against the dark pinon-juniper like a sore thumb.”

      For the Monahans and their dog, Mochassin (CK), a friendly mass of mocha curls, the fit was perfect. “When things work, they work,” Chuck says. “We came here and fell in love with it.”—Ashleigh Morris