In the bedroom, rammed-earth walls and wood floors offer rustic counterpoint to contemporary materials such as marble dust plaster and glass, which lighten the effect. Openings in unexpected places are designed to create a sense of magical movement from inside to out.
echo New Mexico’s predilection for family compounds, but they’re linked by a massive hallway, and that hallway is all Roger. “Roger likes to pace,” says Maniatis, “but he paces like a buffalo. I built a hallway for that.” His buffalo hallway is 120 feet long and almost 10 feet high, with two-foot-thick walls of rammed earth on both sides and polished concrete floors. It’s a beast. But it ends at Mary’s room. Actually it ends with a transition into Mary’s room. The hallway tapers into “the bridge,” a smaller hallway, quiet and calm. The exterior is clad in rusted steel, while the interior is lit Japanese style, with thin horizontal windows at ankle height. “Think of it this way,” says Maniatis. “Roger’s energy is very high. I wanted to create a space—the bridge—that calmed him down before he reached Mary’s room.” Mary’s room is also known as the meditation room. The interior structures are copied from a church in Truchas; the ceiling is a giant skylight. Of course, the couple also shares a few spaces, so Maniatis designed for that as well. The living room, for example, is a place
of mutual coexistence. While the back wall is more Roger—three feet thick, of rammed earth—the rest of the space is Mary: wood floors, white plaster around a fireplace, and a classic Santa Fe-style beamed ceiling. And the tree? Well, capping the house is a series of cantilevered slabs of steel. The area beneath the steel and above the rammed-earth walls is all windows. “We built it,” says Maniatis, “so you couldn’t ignore the tree. The house faces the tree, the roof lines converge on the tree, the windows that line the living room reveal the tree.” The tree is also front and center when one crosses another distinctive feature. On the other side of the line from Mary’s room is the guest house, which connects to the main compound via an outdoor walkway. Its roof is a floating plank of rusted steel, but the sides are open, and the tree, of course, is visible. “I think if Wright were alive to see it,” says Roger, “he would like this house. It’s open, simple, and different. Most importantly, as he stressed, it brings the outside in.” R trendmagazineglobal.com Spring/Summer 2011 » Trend 99