Stedman Renovation and Addition

This renovation and addition, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, opened up and expanded a circa 1950’s ornamentally-adobe-style suburban house for its current owner, an artist. Not without charm the house suffered from problems typical of tract housing.

The underdeveloped and compartmentalized original floor plan was a problem. For example, the closed-off kitchen was awkward and seemed to be as much passageway to the west bedroom as it was kitchen. A middle-bedroom closet and coat closet intrudes into the living/dining area in a rather forced manner.

Interior spaces not only suffer, but so do exterior spaces. They suffer from a low quality of relationship to the interior spaces. The compositional language of its site planning was typical of suburban house site design. The house was positioned, rather densely, squarely in the middle of the site.

This is the ubiquitous house with front and back yards and slivers of spaces on the sides euphemistically called side yards. More often than not these side yards deteriorated into something else entirely. With a minimum of connections to the interior these side spaces became catchalls for soon-to-be junk and, or, in many cases, just derelict.

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