Reading Santa Fe: A Quick Guide to the City's Architectural Styles

For many visitors, Santa Fe feels like a foreign country. The pueblo style architecture—some very old, some brand new—feels mysterious and welcoming.  The fact that the city goes back to 1610 adds to the patina.  

In truth, Santa Fe is amalgam of various historic styles that have influenced the look and feel of most houses built here.  Here is quick road map of Santa Fe styles. 

Pueblo Style: The Original

Long before the Spanish came to this area,  Pueblo peoples in the Rio Grande Valley were building structures. By roughly 900 CE, stacking communal structures that housed hundreds and rose four or five levels in stepped terraces. Taos Pueblo, still occupied today, is a living example of that style. 

The method was elegantly simple but labor-intensive. Earth, ash, and straw were puddled and laid up in low horizontal courses by hand, each band left to dry before the next went on. Roofs rested on peeled log beams called vigas, crossed with smaller poles called latillas, then buried under packed mud. The vigas were cut long, so their ends poked through the exterior wall. That structural detail has over time become a signature look for Santa Fe homes. 

Spanish-Pueblo: The Merger

Spanish missionaries and explorers arrived in 1598, and by 1610 Santa Fe was the capital of New Spain's northernmost province, formally christened La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís.  The Spanish provided one significant improvement to established construction methods: wooden molds. Instead of hand-shaping wet earth, you could press uniform bricks, dry them in the sun, and stack them. What emerged is what people mean by  "Santa Fe style." Thick walls with softened corners. Flat roofs with parapets. Vigas overhead. Beehive-shaped kiva fireplaces tucked into corners. 

Doors and windows were few and small, which sounds gloomy until you spend a July afternoon inside one. Two feet of adobe soaks up heat all day and gives it back all night. Spanish families typically started with a room or two and added more as the family grew, which is why so many older homes ramble in charming, slightly illogical ways.

What to look for: rounded parapets, canales (the drain spouts that shoot roof water clear of the walls), and deep window wells that tell you the walls are genuinely thick rather than stucco over frame.

Territorial: Adobe Puts On a Collar

After the Santa Fe Trail opened in 1821, the American army arrived in 1846, and suddenly the wagon route was delivering milled lumber, fired brick, glass, and Greek Revival taste from back East. Territorial style is what happened when anglo traders met local style. The bones stayed adobe, but the edges got crisp: brick coping capping the parapet, white-painted wood trim, pedimented lintels over double-hung sash windows, square white columns holding up the porch. And houses started to have a bit of symmetry. 

The Railroad Arrives

After the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway reached the region in 1880, the press of Eastern styles influenced local home building. Pressed metal, red brick, and stone went up around the Plaza. Queen Anne, Italianate, Second Empire, and Mansard details arrived with the freight. Some existing adobes were retrofitted with pitched metal roofs and white Victorian porches.

Pueblo Revival: The Comeback

By statehood in 1912, a coalition of archaeologists, artists, and city fathers decided that they wanted Santa Fe to really be the City Different. They pushed new construction back toward indigenous and Spanish traditions.

The Museum of Fine Arts, built on the Plaza in 1917 by Rapp & Rapp, was the first fully realized statement of the revival. Artist Carlos Vierra built the first true Santa Fe style residence the following year. In the 1930s architect John Gaw Meem developed the Territorial Revival alongside it and became the style's most gifted practitioner. His contemporary William Lumpkins pushed adobe's thermal properties into early passive solar design. 

What This Means for Your House Hunt

Santa Fe adopted one of the country's earliest historic district ordinances in 1957, and five districts now cover roughly 18% of the city. Each has its own character:

• Downtown & Eastside — Canyon Road, Acequia Madre, Camino del Monte Sol, Palace Avenue. The oldest and best-preserved Spanish-Pueblo and Territorial homes in the city.

• Don Gaspar — late-1800s brick and stone, Craftsman bungalows, Queen Anne. The city's most architecturally diverse pocket.

• Westside-Guadalupe — former Hispanic farm strips running to the acequias, subdivided among families over generations into wonderfully odd little lots. The eclectic result has its own name: Santa Fe Vernacular.

• Historic Transition — between downtown and the Railyard, now shops, offices, and restaurants.

• Southeast/Museum Hill area — a residential district platted in the early 1950s, home to several museums.

No matter where you look, the Santa Fe look is something you’ll see in almost all homes in Santa Fe.