Opposites come together in Jacona
Wild views, carefully curated collections, contrasting forms and textures bring artist Claire Kahn’s home to life
Wild views, carefully curated collections, and contrasting forms and textures bring artist Claire Kahn’s home north of Santa Fe to life.
Nestled among the aspens, Claire Kahn’s adobe home sits next to a tall-grass pasture west of Pojoaque where ducks touch down on the pond beyond the patio while bobcats scamper through the brush nearby.
As soothing as the natural setting may be, to the consummate designer who lives in the house, it’s the inside that really counts — Tansu cabinets, a collection of Italian glass objects and artfully placed textiles, paintings and African masks that have been with Kahn most of her life.
And then, grandly, there’s the 1860s Bechstein piano finished in a deep caramel color. It’s from crotch-cut walnut that has a natural grain in a liquidy flame pattern.
“I needed a place to put this beautiful piano,” Kahn said, explaining the intersection of events that led her to Northern New Mexico. She inherited the piano when her father died in 2013 and wanted a space big enough to display it properly. By then, she had left her job designing water features — the fountains at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Nev., for example — to devote all her time to jewelry design. And the Stanford Universityeducated artist had a vision for her own studio.
Those circumstances led Kahn, after more than 60 years in the high-cost Bay Area, to think about relocating. Places in Europe and Mexico were on her list. So was Santa Fe, because she sells her jewelry, glass-bead necklaces — what she calls infinity ropes — only through a gallery near the Plaza.
Outside Pojoaque, she found the right place — a home designed in 2000 by Nini Reeves, an architect known for restoring homes using products natural to Northern New Mexico. “It is a modern house that used a variety of tactile, sensual materials,” Kahn said. She was hooked.
So in the summer of 2016, Kahn moved all that’s precious — her cat and kitchen, her art and art-case piano — to her piece of land at the base of the Jemez Mountains.
“The moon bathes the property in light,” Kahn said. “It’s very beautiful and tranquil.” The tension of stone, steel wood and glass created visual disruption, proving one of her design principles: pieces that seem incompatible often go together beautifully.
“I love opposites coming together,” she explained. “It’s a big thing with me.”
Further, Kahn felt drawn to the house because of its striking similarities to the home she had known while growing up. Kahn’s father, Matt, was a respected professor of design at Stanford, and her mother, Lyda, was a well-known weaver.
The family’s house gained its own measure of fame. In 2001, The New York Times used the home to illustrate how simple, classic housing design can endure. The story called Claire Kahn’s father “a modernist since modernism was new” and described how he merged modern
design with affordable housing during California’s post-World War II boom. West Coast developer Joseph Eichler had hired Matt and Lyda Kahn in the 1950s as design consultants.
The Times found that the Kahns’ Stanford house, more than 40 years old at the time of the 2001 story, remained “a synthesis of old and new.” The story said, “the house is a typical Eichler product: a boxy, one-story building of wood post-and-beam construction that looks fairly opaque from the street but that is light and airy inside, with a flowing, open plan, radiant heat and a back elevation that is mostly glass in order to let the outdoors in.”
To Claire Kahn, the relationship between that residence and the one she discovered in Jacona was obvious.
“I melted when I came in the house,” she said. “I fell in love with it.” She began adapting the design sensibility she drew from her parents to her New Mexico home.
But first, the property needed repairs and remodeling. Kahn hired Boni Armijo of Building Adventures Unlimited in Santa Fe to build a fireplace and, most importantly, convert the guest suite to her dream studio. Kahn then dug in to get everything just right.
Outside, double adobe walls frame the house. Inside, horizontal weathered planks reclaimed from a Truchas sheep barn line the wall of her bedroom. Also visible on the interior is a steel I-beam with a bit of rust that intersects with a massive, roughcut beam from upper Quebec. The timber serves as the roof truss running 30 feet down the middle of the house.
Throughout the home, the ceilings and walls extend disruptive odd angles. Stone meets concrete meets glass in the 1,300-sqarefoot living room that offers a clear line of sight from the kitchen to the bedroom. Views of the pasture, pond and mesa are available 24/7 thanks to the west-facing wall of windows that merges the indoor and outdoor living areas.
“The house is a simple form, not compartmentalized,” Kahn noted. “All that glass provides an ambiguity between out and in.”
And in the airy living room, Kahn saw quickly that the Bechstein piano from the 1860s and the black-leather sofa with steel legs, circa 2014, ought to keep close company. Putting them side by side was an easy call for her as she applied again one of her first rules of design. As long as the piano and the sofa are both beautiful, opposites attract.