City relents on synthetic coating in historic district
It’s one of those “only in Santa Fe” things — the City Council spent more than an hour Wednesday deliberating what kind of stucco can be used on residential structures.
It actually took nearly 75 minutes considering before voting unanimously to allow an elastomeric stucco to be applied to a home on the 300 block of Bishops Lodge Road, within a historic district.
But while the newfangled synthetic stucco was allowed to be used, the council mandated that it had to be applied the traditional oldfashioned way — by hand — and not sprayed on, as is done to many modern structures these days.
The issue was raised by Jennifer and Michael Cline, who were appealing an Aug. 11 decision by the Historic Districts Review Board that required them to use a more traditional “cementitious” stucco instead.
According to the 67 pages of material that were included in the City Council packet, “elastomeric stucco presents a more uniform surface and even color, while cementitious stucco shows variations in surface and color that more accurately reflect historic finishes.”
At that same meeting, the H-Board did allow the Clines to use an elastomeric stucco on two other buildings and an adobe wall. The difference was that those structures were considered “noncontributing” to the historic district, while the home whose stucco was in dispute was a contributing structure, meaning that it was built more than 50 years ago (prior to 1935, in fact) in the “Old Santa Fe Style” and made of adobe.
The Clines contend the home is stick built and actually falls into the category of “Recent Santa Fe Style,” meaning that the materials used on it must be similar, but need not duplicate the materials used in Old Santa Fe Style building.
To complicate matters, the previous owners came before the H-Board in 2002 and got approval to have it “re-stuccoed in a Buckskin colour (sic).” That was done, but the buckskin-colored stucco used turned out to be a synthetic stucco. So, for the past 14 years, the home has technically been out of compliance. The Clines didn’t know it was when they bought the home in 2005, but they do now.
An argument could be made that the building no longer was a contributing structure after the synthetic stucco was applied in 2002, but the H-Board treated it as a building that fell out of compliance and now needed to be corrected. Removing the old synthetic stucco and applying a cementitious stucco would cost the Clines about $5,000 more, which, according to the city attorney’s office, didn’t constitute a “hardship” for the owners.
In the end, the council showed sympathy for the Clines, who noted that, as stated in the staff report, only about one-third of the home is visible from the road — the rest of it is obscured by other buildings and trees.
In the end, Historic Preservation Planner Supervisor David Rasch told the council that he hoped to work on adopting a new category of “21st Century Santa Fe Style” that would allow the use of more modern sustainable materials.