Prince Charming

A Northeast Heights couple falls under the spell of a Bart Prince–designed home

BY RENA DISTASIO | PHOTOS BY ROBERT RECK

People have a tendency to nickname Bart Prince homes. Some of the names have become so ubiquitous, you can navigate certain parts of Albuquerque by using them as landmarks: “Once you hit the Spaceship House, you’ve gone too far.” “You know where the Snail House is? I’m a couple blocks down.”

“That happens a lot with my buildings,” says Prince, “they get named after the fact.” While the architect does not design buildings to look like anything other than what they are—completely unique constructs—the eye tends to seek the known in the unknown, the organic in the otherworldly.

Bart Prince (left) with Daleen and Jesse Luehring, the new owners of the home Prince built in 1983 in what is now called North Albuquerque Acres. Right: One of the things that attracted the Luehrings to the home was its bright and open floor plan. According to Prince, a light-filled space was a must for the the original owners. “They didn’t want a house with just holes cut out for windows.”

Even though it hasn’t received as much press as other Bart Prince properties, the far Northeast Heights home he built in the early 1980s for his high school buddy Steve Walley, Walley’s wife, Nancy, and their two young sons, also acquired a nickname: the Airplane House. Or at least that’s what the realtor told Jesse and Daleen Luehring when the couple first looked at the property. Maybe because Steve was an air-traffic controller, it was easy to assume a correlation. Or perhaps because a bird’s-eye-view drawing of the house reveals a certain jetliner sleekness, with its cockpit-like central living area and atria that jut out like wings.

In fact, Prince never intended to mimic an aircraft of any kind. “I don’t even think it was subconscious on my part,” he says.
Still, who can blame realtors for spinning a bit of romance? Shilling the potential of, say, an outdated property is one thing. But trying to inspire prospective buyers to imagine life inside a custom home that does not follow the known conventions of residential home design? That’s a tougher sell.

The Luehrings discovered their purchase also included nearly all of the original paperwork for the home, including Prince’s meticulous drawings, like the floor plan, reproduced above. The couple plans to frame several of these drawings to hang on the walls in the north atrium, which they will convert to an entertainment room. Right: looking east from the dining area into the kitchen, whose halfdome-shaped ceiling was originally constructed entirely of glass. The room features Prince’s original cabinetry, although the Luehrings replaced the appliances and backsplash.

The south side of the house is tucked into a berm, on top of which native grasses grow wild.

Sure enough, when the Walleys’ son Eric put his childhood home up for sale after the death of his parents and brother and moved to Florida, the property languished on the market for nearly three years.

Then the Luehrings took their first tour. The couple had driven by many times en route to visit Jesse’s mom, who lives in the neighborhood, and eventually the house that Daleen said she initially hated became something of an obsession. In November 2013, a week after first touring the home, they made an offer. They moved in a month later.

The Luehrings are young professionals raising two small children, as were the Walleys. Jesse was born and raised in Albuquerque, and Daleen arrived in New Mexico as a teenager to attend the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell. Both love the city and have no desire to live anywhere else. But when they outgrew the small Ridgecrest home they’d purchased at a discount and refurbished, like the Walleys they knew they didn’t want a conventional new home.

“We’re just not cookie-cutter-house people,” says Daleen.

Still, says Jesse, there were practical factors to consider: “Four bedrooms and a three-car garage and a big lot and a good school district,” he says, laughing. “And then, of course, you want it for an affordable price.”

The Walley house would turn out to meet all their criteria.

Sitting on just under an acre of land in North Albuquerque Acres, tucked partially into the earth and featuring a façade of alternating pale ivory and reddish slump block capped by a sharply angled roofline, the home seems almost fortress-like. The interior, however, is all light and air, dominated by a central living space that’s bookended by the kitchen at its eastern end and the living room at its western. Slump-block pillars run the length of each side of the main room, marking the transition to the second-level ground-floor atria, which the Walleys turned into lush indoor gardens. Situated an additional step down from the southern atrium—now below ground—are the master bed and bath, another bathroom, and the three bedrooms—all defined within the space, yet lacking conventional walls. Stone, wood, and tile comprise the home’s structure, while sunlight gives it dimension: it beams through windows and skylights and filters through the pillars, alternately casting shadows and throwing surfaces into relief. The overall effect is warm but also reverent, like the interior of a church.

As beautiful as it is, it does not seem like the typical starter home for a young family. “Steve and Nancy did not live like most families,” Prince explains. “They didn’t want everything shut up into separate rooms. [They wanted] an open floor plan, with spaces that opened up into other spaces. One of our ideas was to design the house as a kind of armature, a framework that could be adjusted as their lives changed—for instance, they could put in either shutters or glass between the rooms and open spaces for more privacy. But they never needed it.”

Jesse, a civil engineer, was instantly fascinated by the layout, as well as by the materials and their placement. “As someone who likes to build and fix things, I was impressed with how incredibly well-built it is.”

Since he and Daleen had also inherited a briefcase full of original documents pertaining to the construction of the home, along with Prince’s meticulous drawings, they naturally brimmed with questions and were thrilled to discover that Prince was amenable to meeting them.

Prince arrived for the meeting with an original model of the home in hand. While he and Jesse talked pros and cons of various materials, Daleen, who works as a coordinator for the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, shared her emotional, almost visceral response to her first tour of the home. “Jesse kept looking at pictures of it online, but I couldn’t believe he was so interested. Finally, though, I saw the potential. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. When we actually went to look at it, that was it. I walked in and just absolutely loved it. Pictures can’t explain this house. I don’t think that anybody is able to fully grasp just how amazing it is until they are here, in its glory.”

Prince smiles at the comment. “Somebody was asking about taking pictures, and I said that it never really stops to have its picture taken. That’s actually my thinking about architecture in general anyway. It shouldn’t just be an object that you can immediately define and understand. There ought to be kind of a mystery about it, sort of like a great symphony. As many times as you hear it, there’s always something new you get out of it—that’s what I think any great work of art ought to do.”

Of all the high arts, however, architecture is the only one with a continual interplay of the practical and the aesthetic. In Bart Prince’s world, the two are one and the same. In a realtor’s world, well . . . Jesse and Daleen, for instance, were immediately warned about the home’s “privacy issues.”

Prince laughs. “I’ve heard it all by this time, but one of the realtors—they were talking to a group that came through as part of an open house—they said, well, one of the positives of this house is that it was designed by Bart Prince. And one of the negatives is that it was designed by Bart Prince.”

Some of the changes from the original construction and design include a uniform coat of paint for the once-bicolor interior blocks. In addition, the atria were at one time lush with plant life up to the skylights, and the conventional front door was originally designed by Prince as a heavy wooden panel that opened not on a hinge but on a pivot. Right: Meeting with the architect of the home they fell in love with—and learning the history behind its construction and design—was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the Luehrings.

Some attempts were made to homogenize the home, including painting over the original alternating colors of slump block of the interior walls and pillars. Prince can only guess that these changes were made at the request of the original listing agent. “Seems that most people who are looking for a house want everything to be tan or white,” he says. “I don’t know why. The house just had so much more life with that alternating block—Steve and Nancy loved it. But some people just . . . I don’t know if it’s preconception or that they expect the outside to be different from the inside. Whereas I’m trying to make it one thing, like an organism, which is not going to change as soon as you move inside.”

Given that the home was built more than 30 years ago, other parts did need updating. The Luehrings installed new appliances, modernized the kitchen and bathroom fixtures, and will eventually redo the master bathroom, which features a single small tub, as well as convert one of the atria from a garden into an entertainment space. They also completed the backyard landscaping at the end of the summer, and plan to start on the front in the spring.

The couple got a kick out of learning that while Nancy loved the idea of the inside gardens, neither of the Walleys was interested in watering outdoor plants or cutting grass. Prince explains, “Steve and I used to mow his parents’ lawn when we were in high school, and then we’d go over and mow my parents’ lawn. I remember, even then, him saying, ‘Never again.’ So one of the first things Steve said when talking to me about designing them a home was, ‘Remember what I said about lawns?’”

What Daleen once thought of as “Bart’s forgotten child” now welcomes a new generation of caretakers to build their lives inside its walls. Some detail work remains to be done, but otherwise, the Luehrings love their Airplane House just the way it is. “This is a beautiful home,” says Daleen, “warm and inviting. We are so thankful to have the opportunity to not only live here but to also make it our own. And we never want to leave.”

From the Spring 2015 issue