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From Primedia Publications
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The Fechin Institute (cont.)
Building the hybrid home.
Eventually Fechin completely rebuilt the place. He devised plump buttresses to disguise and support the additions he attached to both ends of the structure, adzed lumber for doors and furniture, tucked cabinets into the hollows he dug in the mud walls and decorated the doors with carvings of the sunflowers from the mountain valley around him. Fechin did almost everything himself. He devised the two fireplaces (an asymmetric design and a sleekly improved corner parabola) and, in the studio, a Kazan peasant's or Nuevo Mexico shepherd's hearth with a very practical shelf bed above it. He built the furniture, he hauled aspens and spruce down from the mountain to landscape the grounds, he waxed the wood he had exquisitely carved. Fechin enlisted the help of Bill Hinde, an Englishman who had become Taos' blacksmith, to forge his fixtures. Hinde found that working with Nicolai was infinitely more fun than shoeing horses, and he gleefully translated the designs into metalwork.

In a sad irony, Nicolai's adobe, such a livable blend of art and comfort, stood empty nearly 40 years.
Fechin essentially composed the structure, creating a wonderfully hybrid home. His architectural style is a kissing cousin of the Arts and Crafts Movement, but he built in adobe, a resolutely Southwestern material. But Nicolai believed in technology, so the house is a modern work. There's a 1928 electric stove in the kitchen, installed the year power finally came to Taos. A massive Red Top Brand boiler hauled in over the pass from Denver services the central heating system.



The Fechin House is a testament to Fechin's art studies; the Imperial Academy insisted on a classical education for all its students, so Fechin received architectural training. Observe, for instance, the upstairs, where he used trompe l'oeil archways leading through what appear to be massive structural members. The "mass" is hollow, hidden closet space, but it conveys the illusion of walls two feet thick. This gets around a classic problem in adobe structures, the incongruity of fortress-like load-bearing walls butting into skinny partitions. At Fechin's house, the walls smoothly blend.

The whole place is a museum of ancient materials bent to twentieth-century use. That complicated the task of its restorer, Joseph Martinez. Furthermore, each dirt-based house is unique. Bricks mixed up just outside in the yard never came out two alike. To further confuse a restorer, Fechin’s house blends Spanish Colonial building materials (viga, adobe) with Arts and Crafts esthetics (light, texture, complex proportion made to look simple) as seen through the eyes of a Kazan woodcarver. But Martinez, a sound adobe man whose previous job had been restoring the Taos Pueblo, had faith. "I go downstairs," he said. "I stand in front of the man and I ask, 'Just where is your house?' He will tell me. Give him time." "The man" is Nicolai Fechin; Joe talked to the artist's self-portrait. Martinez didn't depend entirely on messages from beyond. He also used the laboratories of the National Park Service. It took that lab (and all of Joe's pueblo experiments) to maintain the place.

The house is a fairy tale come to life. Unfortunately, nobody in it lived happily ever after. Alexandra asked for a divorce in 1933. She wanted to "find herself." Daughter Eya hints that her mother was interested in another man. After a winter in New York Nicolai moved to the West Coast. Alexandra got the house in the divorce settlement but decided it was too big for one person so she moved into the studio instead. In a sad irony, Nicolai's adobe, such a livable blend of art and comfort, stood empty nearly 40 years.

After Alexandra died, Eya Fechin began to restore her father's house. She ran the Fechin Institute (offering shows in the gallery where several of her father's oils and drawings are permanently displayed) and was the driving force behind the Fechin Foundation, designed to carry on the work after Eya is gone. I was lucky enough to have the 83-year-old Eya conduct me through the house and gardens herself. Allow plenty of time. The architecture demands it. Then there are the textiles and small figures Nicolai collected from all over the world, the art that hangs on the walls, the sculptures Nicolai carved, the glass case which holds his portraits of Eya at 19, and above all, that amazing, living wood . . .
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