Living Green—and Yellow and Blue and Red
Colorful Visions of Home

As Ma Tex might say, “My son L.D.’s done fixed hisself up a pretty nice place in Santa Fe. ’Course, he still cain’t decide if he wants to be a fancy designer or a homesteader type. But long as he ain’t hittin’ me up for another loan, I figure he’s doin’ better than usual.”

Ma Tex is the fictional mother of Santa Fe designer-artist L.D. Burke III, created by him out of pure imagination just for fun. Her humorous, gentle jabs at her son’s low level of intelligence—she blames it most often on a horse’s kick to his head—were a staple of L.D.’s self-packaging during his hot-selling, yippee-i-ay furniture-making days in the 1990s.

And Ma Tex would be right: L.D. and his wife, Jan, have fixed themselves up a pretty nice place. What they’ve done, in fact, is merge two distinctive aesthetics—and two distinct structures—into a single home and a lifestyle that suits them both. As you might expect, the sum is greater than the parts.

The Burkes’ home is also a mirror of the ever-evolving natures of both halves of this creative couple. L.D. in particular has reinvented himself many times over the years. In San Francisco, Chicago, and Houston, he pursued successful careers in advertising, graphic design, corporate branding, real estate development, and office and interior design.He revamped and sold a series of homes. He also spent three years as a subsistence farmer in northern Wisconsin, an experience that lingers in his deep desire for simplicity and sustainability, both in architecture and in life.

When he moved to Santa Fe in 1983, L.D. initially thought he’d be a sculptor. Instead, circumstances conspired to propel him into the identity for which he is best known: designer and creator of cowboy-themed furniture and home décor accessories, often adorned with original L.D. Burke sayings of cowboy wisdom and wit. His pieces have been collected by such notables as Ronald Reagan, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and a number of Hollywood celebrities.

L.D. has also designed and built landmark structures in Santa Fe, including the Pink Church (not really a church—it served as his studio for a time and has hosted various tenants since then) on Pacheco Street; the Fortaleza building topped with coyote and dragon gargoyles on Second Street; the massive, mission-style retail space at Jackalope on Cerrillos Road; and the Granaries condominiums at Fifth and Hopewell streets. Over the years he has earned some 200 national and international design awards.

While L.D. grew up in Maine and Massachusetts (no, he’s not from Texas), Jan was a West Coast girl. Raised in Hollywood, she became a licensed landscape architect and worked in California, Idaho, and Arizona before moving to Santa Fe in 1981. It was while serving as a landscape architect for the city that she came across an open field off Don Gaspar Avenue. “I thought, What a nice lot!” she says of the one-third-acre property. She purchased the almost-bare field and started planting; today the property is covered with vegetation, from morning glories to creeping junipers to Austrian pines, all ringed by towering elms.

Jan teamed up with Santa Fean Stefan Merdler—who refers to himself as an ecotect—to build an energy-efficient, earth-sheltered, curved-wall solar adobe home. The cozy 900-square-foot house uses a solar panel for hot water and a passive solar system for heat. Jan did some of the work herself, including laying the foundation, creating a tile mosaic in the bath, and building a small adobe window arch.

Happy with her home, Jan was also happily single when she met L.D. at a friend’s house in 1984. “A couple of days later he called and said, ‘Put some water on for tea; I’ll be right over.’ I thought, Oh my, this person is really forward.” But it turns out he also met the most important qualification on her must-have list for a potential life partner: a shared vision of a spiritual path.

For the first 20 years of their marriage, L.D. and Jan enjoyed their compact solar home. They climbed a ladder of smooth-worn cedar every night to the loft bedroom. The couple eventually added another small room in the back. And L.D. later built two Wisconsin-style outbuildings (one red, one green) for storage and Jan’s workspace. Her career had been evolving as well, from landscape architecture to mediation, and finally led to her current profession as a licensed clinical counselor and crisis counselor at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center.

In time the Burkes decided it would be nice to have room to spread out. Jan’s vision, inspired by aerial photos of West African family compounds, was to create a “motley assortment of little pods,” she says. What L.D. designed and built is neither motley nor little pods, but it does necessitate walking outside to get from one part of the house to another.

The addition, as the couple calls it, is a separate, 2,400-square-foot structure connected to the original house by a covered walkway and finished in L.D.’s signature style of bold color and creative detail.The two-story, brick-red-and-green stucco house, with a tall, deep entryway, contains an upstairs master suite that opens to a large corner balcony, plus workspaces downstairs for both L.D. and Jan. It also has two guest wings.

The kitchen, dining, and living areas are still in the original house, where a trellis-covered patio sees daily use in the warmer months. “I think our visual aesthetic is like these Persian carpets,” Jan reflects, gesturing toward the floor where one of the Burkes’ two shelties is settling onto a well-worn rug. “There’s an overall pattern and a certain symmetry, but also eclecticism. There are lots of colors, but they’re colors that work together.”

“Imagine having to go outside to go inside. It’s a neat way to live,” adds L.D. “We’re outside people. I never sit inside unless it’s dark.” To be even closer to the outdoors, L.D. designed and built an Adirondack-style, off-the-grid cabin north of Santa Fe at Heron Lake, where the Burkes love to pull up their chairs to the lake-facing French doors in the early morning and watch the real-life “nature channel.” The cabin’s construction includes brackets made from discarded elk antlers and “great insulation” made of leftover cuttings from a blue jean factory, L.D. notes. “The cabin is an ongoing labor of love.”

Complete with a brightly painted two-holer outhouse, the rural property also fulfills L.D.’s desire to step aside from the complexity and breakneck speed of contemporary life. “I’m not into acquisition or pomp and circumstance. I struggle to be simple,” he relates. At the same time, he thrives on an incessant stream of creative projects, including his cowboy furniture (sold at Simply Santa Fe), paintings he describes as “pulp fiction rip-off,” found-object sculpture, poetry, and songwriting—in local concerts Randy Travis often sings an L.D. Burke song about sopapillas.

“Never in my life did I love cowboys,” Jan admits with a smile. “But it’s the one underneath I love, the one who creates the cowboy image, and he can create anything. I’ve never known anybody who could make so many useful things. I’m blown away.” For her part, Jan’s creative energy follows a more organic pattern, like the plants that have been such an important part of her life. “As a counselor,” she explains, “my job is to evoke from a person what’s inside and have them blossom from their own roots.”

L.D.’s primary interest these days is architecture—imaginative and energy efficient. A current local project in the design phase is a passive-solar home powered by photovoltaics and built of autoclaved concrete, a lightweight, high-insulation-value material frequently used in Europe and beginning to be known here. “My intention,” he states simply, “is to design architecture that makes sense, and to stay interested in the world.” •

Democratizing Culture • In Guad We Trust • Desert Edge: SF Design Weekend 08
The Design Road: SF Design Weekend 08 • Back to the Future
Living Green—and Yellow and Blue and Red • Experience Design—the Jewelry of Hollie Ambrose
Experience Fashion—the Music of Michael Stearns • Business Profiles • Living Urban • Contributors