Tijeras, New Mexico

WIP, 2017 - Ongoing

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Project Designer

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The Thunderbird House is a quiet retreat in the East Mountain area of New Mexico.  Tucked into a nook of the Cibola National Forest, the house is a modest adobe structure with unusually large windows that look out to a mix of juniper, cedar, and ponderosa pine, the Sandia Mountains, the occasional coyote, and the errant bear.  A live-in work-in-progress, the minimal house is a constant teacher and the changing light a constant companion.

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"The house isn't mine.  I don't own it so much as I take care of it.  This occurs to me as I work on the roses, cutting away the old canes.  I don't like the roses, but I care for them because they came with the house.  As I prune them, I have the sense that all of this--the brick the roses climb, the lath and plaster, the copper pipes, the oak floors, the coal room, the cracked slab on which it all rests--is a gift.  Not to me, but to the future.  The house is just passing through my hands.  It's not a purchase, it's a husbandry.  I'm in service to the house.  The truth of this is married to the other truth, that the house serves me.  I can borrow against this asset, which will grow in value if all goes well.  But a house, my grandfather warned me just before we bought this house, is a place to live.  Not an investment."

-Eula Bliss, Having and Being Had