A Tale of Santa Fe: Betty Stewart in the City Different

Reviewed by Pete Warzel

I have heard about Betty Stewart homes during our dealings at the Historic Santa Fe Foundation, and while searching for extraordinary properties to engage for our Steward events. I do not believe I have ever been to visit one. I now most definitely want to.

Mark H. Cross tells the story of an amazing life, one that he binds to the architectural and preservation history of Santa Fe, and like Stewart herself, Cross sides on artistic and architectural creativity, not the restrictive condiitons of the Santa Fe Historic Styles Ordinance of 1957. He sees both Stewart and the City of Santa Fe on parallel but divergent tracks – each in a search for identity. “Santa Fe’s ordinance was written to restore the entire historic district to what it should look like.” Betty, on the other hand, stated in a city council meeting appeal to stop one of her pitched roof houses, “I like a pitched roof. Why do you like a blue jacket. It’s a matter of taste.” And that is where the line was drawn, taste. 

The house in question was her own, an addition that was designed with a pitched roof at Acequia Madre and Garcia Street. The debate was on, vociferously, with a cast of friends and family of our foundation – the Old Santa Fe Association, John Meem, Irene von Horvath, Pen LaFarge, and our neighbor at our former Hovey House, Pat French. This makes for fascinating recent history (1980) and I will not spoil the outcome here.

Betty Stewart was the daughter of a successful Texas automobile dealer and a privileged and refined mother who attended finishing school in Nashville. By all accounts Betty was a real pistol. Born in Dalhart, Texas, the family bought a working cattle ranch on Ute Creek in Harding County, New Mexico where she and her brother Pete were home schooled. Her mother eventually sent Betty to the Brownmoor School in Santa Fe, then housed at Bishop’s Lodge, a school similar to the regime at the boy’s equivalent school in Los Alamos, the Los Alamos Ranch School (soon to be the secret city). Betty became acquainted with her future home.

But to get there she had to struggle – through alcoholism, coming out as a lesbian in conservative Dalhart, physical deterioration – and then, suddenly quit drinking and began to find her true self. Santa Fe was now home, “ a place for misfits” as Cross states, “welcoming to eccentrics.”

In the early 1970’s Betty Stewart designed and built a house that was based on one her brother Pete had designed for a friend in Tesuque, with a pitched roof that would become Betty’s signature style. The inspiration was the Stewart family ranch house on Ute Creek, adobe wall construction, long portals, open ceiling to the roof, brick floors. But it was her sense of space and proportion that would define her style. “A Betty Stewart house feels honest….It was as if she had studied the Modernism rule book – in her houses, form follows function and materials look like what they.” Cross gives a primer a Stewart home, designated by elements and succinct descriptions that is well worth reading. The sections are accompanied by photographs that give life to the narrative, and call out the specifics that define her form. “The great room always had a chandelier, which might be glass, pewter or New Mexican tinwork.” And wonderful commentary. “Betty was not very domestic, so she had little interest in kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms.” More than the pitched roofs as defining of Stewart’s style, I see in the photographs the sculptural feeling of the interiors – deep door openings and window wells, ornamental and scalloped details over the door and window openings, all carved into the double thickness of adobe.

Cross then places Betty Stewart in the re-re-definition of Santa Fe’s identity with the invention of Santa Fe Style in the 1980’s as the “New West,” the trend du jour for fashion and interior design proclaimed by Ralph Lauren, Bloomingdales, Sakes Fifth Avenue, and on. “Soon,

New York-based decorators, designers, photographers and writers who never thought of Santa Fe were visiting the city and returning with their own ideas of how to promote it.” It was a boom of publicity, and a trend. Betty’s new house was the subject of an article in House & Garden magazine. “She was portrayed as a prairie savant who used traditional building techniques that others had forgotten.” Betty Stewart, after a difficult life, had become, like Santa Fe, a brand.

Mark Cross has written a well-researched history of a true Santa Fe spirit. Betty Stewart’s difficult road to sobriety and legitimacy ran parallel to the city searching, then creating, the most recent version of its identity. A Tale of Santa Fe it is, and a well written biography of an adoptive Santa Fean, who was uncompromising in her own vision of what style must be.

A Tale of Santa Fe: Betty Stewart in the City Different
By Mark H. Cross
Caminito Publishing LLC
Softbound, 240 pages
$26.95