Historic homes are living places – made to live in today as much as they were when they were first built. Kelly Koepke visits a home on Upper Canyon Road in Santa Fe that has been home to families for almost a century. She finds a place that has changed, but still maintains its own spirit and distinctive Santa Fe style.
A Historical, Century-Old Santa Fe Home
Adelma and Tom Hnasko’s home is just right for their family. She remembers wandering the grounds as a girl, playing among the cottonwoods and evergreens which lie just across the Santa Fe River from her own childhood home on Cerro Gordo. When the couple purchased the 1937 adobe out of foreclosure in late December of 2002, it was like a homecoming for her.
The equally cozy and bright living area.
But the structure wasn’t move-in ready for them and their soon-to-arrive first son. The heat didn’t function. Rain and snow poured through the entry gallery’s ancient windows while the warmth escaped. The kitchen sink drained into a bubbling backyard cesspool. Switching small appliances on meant the lights would short out.
“I was pregnant, and the house was freezing,” says Adelma, an educator and arts consultant. “The bones of this house were so cold. The bank wouldn’t let us do inspections or due diligence before we signed the contract.”
Tom and Adelma add their own stamp to their almost 100-year old home, such as the kitchen cabinets by her father.
So naturally, they threw a New Year’s Eve party to celebrate the acquisition. Adelma lit fires in each of the four fireplaces every day to warm up the adobe walls. They invited a friend to DJ the evening in the bare rooms. Until this day, friends enthuse about the event as a beautiful way to christen the space with joy, goodwill, and love.
Creating Warmth and Comfort in a Historical Home
Then began the work of making the house habitable, while doing their best to maintain the integrity of the three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and 3,500 square feet. Six months after the party, with the installation of a snug roof and new boiler trucked in from Denver, the couple and their new baby finally moved in. In due course, Adelma delivered the Hnasko’s second child in their bedroom.
Family decor rests throughout the home.
Over the next two decades, the interior has been replastered, the pantry walls jacked up to prevent further collapse, the electrical system rewired, and a radon abatement system added. Kitchen drainage now meets the city water and sewer lines. Adelma’s woodworker father contributed by crafting a wall of kitchen cabinets and refacing the existing storage to match.
“It’s an old house, so it’s a work in progress, right?” says Tom, an environmental attorney with a passion for trees and improving the property’s landscape. “It means you have to have time and patience with a place, for it to let you know it. Some of the things you think you might have wanted to do, in fact you find you don’t ultimately want to do. We had those old leaky, single-paned entry gallery windows for 20 years. Every winter it would be freezing, and we would put plexiglass over them.”
Family entertaining in a sun-filled dining room.
Those windows, in what was originally an open, covered portal converted to enclosed living space, have now been replaced with energy efficient fenestration. It transforms the long passageway between common areas and bedrooms from a drafty space into a warm and light-filled one full of plants, seating, and an inviting view of the interior courtyard.
Windows bring the outdoors, inside.
Continuing on a Family Legacy
Family also played a big part in the decoration and décor of the house. The passage between the kitchen and original, 1930s-era, turquoise-fixtured bathroom has become an ancestral history wall with photographs from floor to ceiling. That, and other rooms, are full of eclectic artwork, furniture, and lighting collected by Adelma’s grandparents, who lived in thirteen different countries around the world. An engineer who built roads, her grandfather accumulated a vast assortment of folk and fine art, which sits on and against walls, on chests and ledges, and hangs from ceilings.
A chaise lounge baths in sunlight from the windows.
There are some serendipitous “it must be meant to be” connections between the Hnaskos and a long-time previous resident family, too. The poet Lucile Adler and her husband Nat lived in the home beginning in the 1940s marking more than 30 years of their own significant moments. Nat, a Harvard-trained architect whose more famous classmate was Louvre pyramid designer I.M. Pei, relocated his family from the East Coast after contracting tuberculosis during internment in a German World War II prison camp.
Renovation Connections
The Adlers replaced the original dirt floors of the grand sala living/dining room with a chevron pattern of bricks purportedly salvaged from a renovation of Santa Fe’s La Fonda on the Plaza hotel, possibly in the 1960s. Lucile, whose poetry was published in The New Yorker and other national magazines, presumably wrote much of her activist and anti-war poems around the kitchen table, even as she succumbed to dementia in her later years. The Adler’s daughter, Kathy, still lives in Santa Fe and has shared many of her memories with the Hnaskos, including that she and her brother had a treehouse in the same tree where Tom later built one for his boys.
Adelma stands in a hallway filled with family photos.
Nat’s illness prevented him from working much, but he did design and build the home’s wooden doors in a long-gone workshop where today sits a backyard gazebo. River rock, excavated during the back yard’s extensive irrigation system fed from the property’s well, form the gazebo’s walls.
Combining the Past and Present in This Historic Home
Adler would also rest and recline on the rear porch with its lush, peaceful view of almost two acres of mature trees. He passed away on that porch in the 1980s and his ashes were interred under a white fir tree seen from the kitchen window. Tom transplanted a volunteer off-shoot of that beautiful tree to a spot near the property’s driveway where it thrives today. In a true passion project, Tom has planted hundreds more in the decades since then.
The couple’s master bedroom, both light-filled and cozy.
In 2011, Adelma’s father spent his last weeks on that same back porch with the same peaceful, green view that Nat Adler enjoyed. “There was something so comforting for me in that. It was as if I could see this sweet, rutted northern New Mexico road, and know that there was already a rut that Mr. Adler had flown from the same spot. I knew that my dad would find exactly the path out, because it’s already happened. And I’m sure it’s happened many, many times. To feel like we’re part of that larger fabric with our own family has been really special for us. Birth and death here, right?” Adelma says.
Maintaining Structure
Of course, a piecemeal house from the 1930s, like many older Santa Fe homes, requires vigilance lest the adobe bricks crumble back into the earth from which they were made. “We walked into the living room (weeks before this article’s photoshoot) and the whole entire floor in the dining room around the radiator had sunk. And wow, guess what? We had squirrels living underneath who had excavated a void that fell in,” says Tom wryly.
It’s a small price to pay for a house that is more than walls and floor and brick and windows. It’s a home, layered in history and life and memories. Home to the Adlers, now the Hnaskos, and one day another family who will live in and treasure this special place as well.
Story by Kelly Koepke
Photography by Tira Howard
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