Upscale Touch

Elite N.M. Hotel Builds with Tactile Style

By Neal Singer

The new Auberge Encantado outdoes the style and elegance of the site’s former hotel Rancho Encantado in every way. The $36 million project, featuring many upscale textures and finishes, opens this summer.

Building an upscale resort can challenge general contractors and their subs.

All the basics are still required but the work has to appeal to the imagination of a clientele paying a bit more for an evocative locale.

Some of that imagination comes from the people building the project.

The $36 million Encantado resort is being developed by Mills Valley, Calif.-based Auberge Resorts. Expected to open this summer 7 mi north of downtown Santa Fe, the property will blend into a landscape of 57 rolling acres.

The upscale resort with extraordinary mountain views is expected to charge from $400 to $975 a night for its suites and $2,000 a night for its villas during the high season from July through October, according to Encantado reservation sales manager Juan Vigil.

Justifying the extraordinary lodging costs are unique construction accents to the resort’s 22,000-sq-ft main lodge, 65 casitas, art gallery and sculpture garden, and luxury spa, which includes a “yoga building” and private treatment facilities.

The basics of all the buildings are conventional enough: a mixture of wood, metal-stud framing and structural steel, says Chris Butler, project manager for Albuquerque-based general contractor Jaynes Corp.

But for visual interest, there’s much more. For one, “We installed visible, glued-laminated roofing beams in the main lodge 18 to 24 in. thick, about 24 ft long,” Butler says.

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Jaynes senior superintendent Daniel Barnsley adds, “We used a lot of different, really interesting finishes in our colored concrete topping slabs.” The differently colored concrete, drywall and stucco finishes, which tactilely range from smooth to rough, offer variety to the eye and hand.

And that’s just the start.

Two rammed-earth walls in the resort’s restaurant and bar serve as room dividers. Another rammed-earth structure is the base for an outdoor buffet in a nearby enclosed courtyard.

“A large earthern mass has character to it,” says Chandler Huston of Huston Rammed Earth Inc. of Edgewood, N.M. “People love the striations in it, which resembles the sediment layers of mountains.”

Huston’s crew used a mix with 10% Portland cement to stabilize the crusher-fine gravel and rammed it in layers into forms. “It’s seismically sounder than adobe because of the monolithic pour,” he says.

The courtyard is graced by a sculptural fountain that Paul Zeir, owner of Santa Fe-based Reflections, Ponds and Fountains, describes as “complicated.”

Water flows from one of six boxes to another, requiring attention to six different water levels.

“I was given a concept but I had to rework it to make it work engineering-wise and aesthetically, too,” Zeir says the 21-year veteran of fountain design.

Jim and Christine Glidden, the owners and steel designers of Albuqerque-based High Desert Forge Inc. found it a little unusual to wrap a building in Corten steel as an architectural statement. But they’re doing it.

Corten steel rusts like any steel but then forms a protective membrane that stops the rusting process. It will provide weathered exterior effects for the art gallery, lodge and spa.

“They were worried about us penetrating their buildings with a lot of fasteners,” says Jim Glidden, “so we designed basically a billboard attached to bump-out areas and covered with a parapet cap.”

“Few people know how to do this kind of work,” Christine Glidden says. “The architect knows the look he wants but not how to get it, so it’s a kind of symbiotic relationship. We make it up as we go.”

The couple has the experience. Their company was awarded Southwest Contractor’s 2006 Best Steel Project in New Mexico for similar metal work using Corten steel on Albuquerque’s Tricentennial Towers on Rio Grande Boulevard.

The casitas at Encantado will feature marble and granite surfaces for baths, tub decks, entry tops and fireplace surrounds. The spa clothes-changing areas and the resort lodge get similar treatment.

“It’s nothing exotic, but there’s a lot of rock,” says Danny Erdman, commercial operations manager for Rocky Mountain Stone, based in Albuquerque. “The majority of rock we’re installing is granite. About one-third is Travertine.”

Also in the casitas, an unusual design hides vents and some bathroom lighting fixtures by recessing them into coves.

Tak Ledbetter, project manager for Albuquerque-based Yearout Mechanical says, “We came up with the idea of the hidden boxes for the grilles to be up in. I looked at the situation, drew something on paper I thought might work, they seemed to like it and we went ahead.”

Plants and trees in the resort will be nourished by 100% rainwater, says Martin Stallings of Santa Fe-based Desert Rain Systems. But not as it comes pouring out of the sky. Stallings’ company has installed underground roof-runoff rainwater catchment tanks, invisible to guests.

The tanks range from 3,800 to 35,000 gallons of holding capacity, with a total storage capacity of 150,000 gallons for the entire site. Four-in., schedule-40 PVC pipe is standard around the casitas. A heavier grid of 6-in. diameter pipe is used near the larger roof catchment area of the lodge. “We catch all the roof runoff,” Stallings says. “We run it through a filtration system, store it for irrigation, then pump it from the tank through another filtration system to be acceptable to drip systems.”

The system is simple but the topography of rock, hillside and ongoing construction make it complex, he says. The project required approximately 9,000 ft of pipe.

Yet another water-conservation system treats gray-water waste to provide safe water for landscaping near the entrance to the complex. Using an ultraviolet disinfection process as well as a process that removes nitrogen, Integrated Water Service Inc of Avon, Colo. was able to lower the nitrogen content of waste water to 10 mg/liter. “The standard is normally 30,” says Jeff Thomas, the company’s VP of business development.

John Brawly, landscape architect for Albuquerque-based Heads Up Landscape Contractors, faced a different problem. “Even though the project includes water-harvesting systems -- and the amount of water reused here indeed will be unusual - it doesn’t mean you’re going to be filled up all the time.”

To develop landscaping that would survive good times and bad as it grew in place, “We had a lot of free rein in our design,” Brawley said.

Crews took areas disturbed by construction and installed native landscaping requiring little water that would mature over time to look as natural as possible. “There are challenges in doing it, and more so in communicating to management that it takes time for the landscape to germinate more, and look better and better, using less water as time passes.”

The resort is set on the site of an old hotel, now demolished, that once hosted Jimmy Stewart, Johnny Cash and Peter Fonda, says project architect Dana Aiken of Irvine, Calif.-based Aiken Pate Architects.

Key Players

Developers: Auberge Resorts
Architects: Aiken Pate Architects; Hart Howerton (initial design)
General Contractor: Jaynes Corp
Structural Engineer: Desert Eagle Engineering
Subcontractors: Chaparral Electric; Yearout Mechanical; Coronado Wrecking; Heads Up Landscaping; High Desert Forge; Huston Rammed Earth; Desert Rain Sys.; Rocky Mountain Stone; TLC Plumbing & Utilities

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