Boutique Hotel
Interior Design
Our firm has been doing boutique hotel work in the American Southwest for nine years now.
We started in Santa Fe. That city has strict building codes about adobe and regional style – you can't just put up anything you want. I actually like that.
Boutique hotels are not big hotel chains. They are small. Twenty rooms, thirty rooms. The one we just finished in Tucson has seventeen. The lobby is smaller than most people's living rooms. That's the point.
- reclaimed wood
- local stone
- handwoven textiles
- wrought iron hardware
The whole idea is that a hotel in New Mexico should feel like New Mexico.
Not like it was designed in some office in New York and dropped there. We've lost projects because clients wanted something "more universal." We don't do universal.
The Furniture
We buy most of our furniture from salvage yards and small makers within a 200-mile radius. Old ranch pieces. Mesquite. Pine that's been sitting in barns for sixty years. Heavy stuff. Real joinery. We're not putting particle board in a hotel room.
The Textiles
For textiles, we work with weavers in Chimayó. They've been doing this for generations. Wool blankets, rugs, pillow covers. The colors come from the region – rust, sage, that particular brown you see in the high desert. We've been buying from the same family since 2017.
about the tile work...
Mexican tile is everywhere in the Southwest. Talavera. You know it – the blue and yellow hand-painted stuff. We use it sparingly. A bathroom backsplash. The front desk surface. Covering an entire wall looks like a theme restaurant. We learned that the hard way on an early project.
Our tiles come from a workshop in Dolores Hidalgo. They ship to El Paso, we pick up from there. Each tile is hand-painted. Imperfect. Some of them have small chips. We use those ones anyway – they look better than perfect ones somehow.
the lighting thing...
Lighting can wreck a space. We've walked into beautiful rooms that feel like a dentist's office because someone put in 4000K LEDs. Cold and flat. Everything looks bad.
We stick to warm. 2700K, sometimes 2400K in bedrooms. Table lamps. Sconces. Floor lamps with linen shades. Almost no overhead fixtures in guest rooms – we just don't like them. The lobby gets one or two pendants. We hunt for vintage ones from the 1940s and 1950s when we can find them.
dealing with old structures...
Old buildings in the Southwest have their own issues. Adobe cracks. Vigas sag. Plumbing was added decades after construction and it shows.
We don't fight the building. A crack in a 1920s adobe wall isn't a problem – it's just what the wall does. What we fix: safety stuff, comfort stuff, things that actually don't work. A sagging beam gets sistered. A crack gets sealed but not hidden.
The property we finished in Old Town Albuquerque last year had original brick floors. Uneven. Some bricks were cracked. We cleaned them, sealed them, left them alone. New tile would have been faster. Would have looked like every other renovation. The client pushed back at first. Now she sends us photos of guests taking pictures of those floors.
our vendor situation
We keep a list. Forty-one vendors right now. Salvage dealers, furniture makers, tile sources, metalworkers, electricians who won't panic when they see old wiring. Took us years to find all of them. We don't share this list with competitors.
If you're starting a firm that does this kind of work, make your own list. Drive out to the workshops. Shake hands. Watch people work. It takes a looong time. Nobody's going to hand it to you.