Gael Arthur  in Santa Fe 



As you wander down the streets around the plaza.  You feel as though you have moved through a time warp.    . 

SANTA FE STYLE

" Santa Fe style." 
It’s one of those expressions that conjures up everything from turquoise jewelry to Ansel Adams black and white photos of cacti to desolate hilltops best suited for making contact with your previous (or is it future?) lives.  

The interior decorators have scads of fabrics and wall treatments that fall into the category
 (Hint:  generally to be had at deep discount).  But what is it? And what does it have to do with Santa Fe itself? 

I won’t attempt to explain why people think it can be transported to a dentist’s office in Hoboken, New Jersey or a penthouse apartment in Munich (I’ve simply no idea), but I will attempt to explain why it works in Santa Fe and why you should go there to see it. 

First of all, it has to do with city ordinances.  Strict zoning by-laws have resulted in a town that has more uniformity than almost any city in the world (aside from medieval fortresses like Erice in Sicily, where not much has changed in several hundred years, there not being much room inside a walled city up on top of a mountain).  

With a few exceptions, buildings in the main part of Santa Fe are either adobe, or are stuccoed to look like adobe.  

The city regulations have a further requirement – no buildings in the central core can be higher than five stories.  

Imagine, no 27 floor office towers of gleaming glass and steel, logos of banks and insurance companies proclaiming their territory.  Instead, the vast majority of buildings are one or two stories high, generally in some shade of brown.  
More precisely, stucco must be earth colours, which ranges from brown and beige through mauve, gray and green.  

The effect is remarkable as you wander down the streets around the plaza.  You feel as though you have moved through a time warp – the vehicles on the road are current vintages (with SUVs outnumbering regular cars by a margin of three or four to one), but the buildings seem to come from another era.

 The chicken and egg question raises its head over the artsy element of the town – what was Santa Fe before the artists arrived and made it a Mecca to the art community? 

Not that it really matters – what matters is that this town rivals New York for galleries, with many offering museum quality pieces for sale.  


The phrase embarrassment of riches comes to mind walking into some of the galleries, with the art in no way limited to cow skulls, exotic flowers and horses.  The big galleries like the Gerald Peters Gallery and Nedra Matteucci (www.matteucci.com) are astonishing – there is nothing like the feeling as you stroll into a gallery, notice a nice little painting on the wall, wander over to it, thinking it would look nice in your entry hall – that is, until you notice the $425,000 price tag.  Maybe not this trip.  

But to see that level of art in countless galleries cheek by jowl in a town of 60,000 in the desert with not much else around is a powerful thing.   

Equally worthy (and closer to this humble soul’s budget) are the smaller galleries that line Canyon Road, Paseo de
Peralta and a few other streets that meander through town.  

The Good Hands Gallery, owned and operated by the Ramon Jose Lopez family is one of my favourites, with the easy blending of painting, sculpture silverwork, religious icons, wrought iron chandeliers and furniture design flowing from room to room. (www.goodhandsgallery.com) The artists represented here offer traditional and contemporary New Mexico art, but that’s really too big a category to define the gallery.  Better just go and look at it. 

 Not far from there, the Wyeth-Hurd Gallery is both unassuming and somehow of another world, in part, no doubt, because it resides in one of the few brick-type pitched roof houses built during the 1910 – 1930 period, pretty much resembling houses all over the US. 

The gallery represents most of the artists of the Wyeth clan – the family tree in the gallery is reproduced on their website (www.wyethhurd.com) so you can try to sort out the generations before you get there, if that sort of thing is important to you. 

 My appreciation of art lies more in the wandering around and looking at it, so Santa Fe is my kind of town.  However, with more than 250 art related businesses in the town, unless you are planning to move there, or spend a season, it behooves you to do a bit of planning.  For this, check out www.collectorsguide.com/

 With so many commercial galleries offering museum quality art, what can the museums hold?  Well, not to worry, the museums offer fine collections and are well organized as a group – you can get a 4 day pass to see several of the museums for a reasonable price ($10, last time I checked), so you don’t have to feel rushed or overwhelmed. 

 Of course, after all this art, you will need to eat.  Given its status as tourist town, as well as second home to the stars and escape haven for spiritual renewal, the number of restaurants competes aggressively with the gallery count.  

The food ranges from classic French and Italian to California and plain old American, but my personal preference is to stick with Santa Fe style through the food as well.  New Mexican food is not Tex-Mex or California Mexican, it is a style of its own – try Tomasita's at 500 South Guadalupe, tel. 505-983-5721.  Beware, they NEVER take  reservations, so arrive early and be prepared to wait.  

Talk your way into the bar and have a Grand Gold margarita (or two) while waiting and give the green chile salsa a try – it’s killer for clearing the sinuses and easing the aches and pains in your body (or, perhaps that can be better attributed to the margarita). 

For a New Mexico recipe, check out the Bon Appetit section.

 Go back to your hotel, grab your sweaters (or borrow a blanket, better) and head out to the open-air opera (http://santafeopera.org/).  

Even in the middle of summer, it gets very chilly at night (a roof was installed in 1998 to protect patrons from the worst of the weather, but the wind can still take its toll on ill-prepared tourists).  You are wise to order tickets in advance – the number of people desperately looking for tickets far outnumbered the number of sellers (when we overhead the prices being negotiated, we were sorely tempted to cash in on our seats – however, the performance was certainly worth the price we had initially paid by phone order).

 So, this Santa Fe style, what is it again?  Well, the key element is the integration of art and life – the architecture fits the furniture fits the art on the walls fits the sculpture in the garden, fits the jewelry on the wrist, fits the icon in the church, fits the stunted sage coloured trees on the undulating hills.  It all fits.

 Other Web Links:

www.santafe.org - This link is great, and will tie you into just about everything you might want to know about the city and what to do there.