Word: fe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...extent that anyone can define it, Santa Fe style is largely a matter of shape and shading -- the colors of sagebrush and ashes, watery blues and rose and clay. The sand-castle city of its birth is a town without right angles, where whitewashed walls and doorways and fireplaces bend and curve, hand shaped from clay. Sometimes, as translated by non-Hispanic designers like Architect David Kellen, the style becomes an "abstraction of a Mexican type of design...
...seems to be a Taco Bell on every corner, Corona beer in every bar. The First Lady's preferred fashion designer, Adolfo, is Cuban. And out of the crossover into the mainstream come some curious hybrids: bolero jackets with blue jeans, Jalapeno Cheez Whiz, Brie enchiladas and, in Santa Fe, even an adobe McDonald...
...recent years, particularly in the South and West, Hispanic decorating styles have spread from ethnic enclave to city center to suburb. Design and architecture magazines and chic boutiques are full of the terra-cotta pots, vivid woven rugs and ceramic tiles of the Santa Fe style, and homebuilders around the country are busy slapping stucco onto plywood and chicken wire to satisfy a growing yen for adobe homes. At the same time, more public buildings are being constructed in a modern flourish on the Old World style of Spain, with arched porticoes, wide, shady courtyards and bubbling fountains. "I like...
...history, a lot of family and no sharp edges. Of all the U.S.'s Latino landscapes, perhaps the most haunting is in New Mexico, where Native American, Spanish and eastern-Anglo sensibilities have boiled together in the Southwest sun for the past four centuries. The so- called Santa Fe look, romanced into the mainstream by Ralph Lauren, has turned into the hottest design fad in years. "People naturally want to return to the earth," explains Rachel Elizondo, owner of Santa Fe's Storyteller gallery, a mecca for decorators. "A clay pot built by hand in natural colors is a living...
Natives see a certain irony in the sudden cachet of their homespun style. "Originally people built adobe homes, which are really mud huts, because the materials were cheap and available," explains Santa Fe Architect Michael Bodelson, 33. "It was a vernacular architecture, low technology." These days, he notes in amusement, only the rich can afford to build adobe homes, since authentic construction can add about 15% to 20% to the cost of a comparable wood-frame or brick home...