Portrait by Christiaan Blok

Featured as a Master of the Southwest
in 1992, John T. Midyette III Continues
to Raise the Bar on Innovative Design

When Karen Loud wanted a house built in Santa Fe 20 years ago, a wise friend suggested she look at potential architects’ own homes. Loud did that, and John Midyette “had the only one I liked,” she relates. So she signed him on. It was a good call. Still in the home Midyette designed—as are a remarkably high percentage of the architect’s other clients—Loud declares it was “designed to be a comfortable house to live in, and it is exactly that.”

Midyette would be pleased; comfort and livability are among his primary goals. Since opening the Santa Fe-based firm of John T. Midyette III & Associates in 1970, this 1992 Master of the Southwest has succeeded in his other objectives as well: using the highest quality builders, craftspeople, and materials—“green” long before the concept of green emerged—and creating flowing, light-filled spaces that fit each client’s lifestyle.
 

Photography by Insightfoto Inc. An adobe wall inset with a wooden gate from a former Mexican jail announces the entry to this recently completed John Midyette-designed residence in Santa Fe. The architect frequently incorporates reclaimed materials in his projects.

This last criterion was among the qualities that first drew Midyette to the architecture of the Southwest. As a young man with a graduate degree in architecture from Tulane University, he was on a road trip from New Orleans to California in 1963 when he found himself stranded in Santa Fe in a storm that dumped three feet of snow. He hunkered down in the historic La Fonda Hotel on the Plaza and immediately fell in love with the fluid, soft-edged adobe architecture of the town.

“It was exciting, a whole new vernacular,” recalls the amiable architect, seated in his office with his white cockatoo perched on his shoulder. He found Santa Fe’s aesthetic the antithesis of the boxy, facade-oriented structures, often with pre-set floor plans, that he had known growing up on the East Coast.