A Vision in Process

When designer Mike Fischer begins to work on one of his signature “sculptural residences,” he’ll start by standing on the land where the house will be built, observing what the land suggests as a natural flow for a home and the people who’ll live in it, and listening to what the land wants.

Fischer, a maverick designer and builder in the highly competitive world of Santa Fe home design, finds that the process of building good homes is as simple and as complicated as a marriage between good decisions and good land.

Decisions – and how well they are made – are the lifeblood of a designer’s process, and Fischer has had a lifetime of experience to help him determine what to do next on this land.  With an experience base stretching back thirty years, Fischer’s dream of becoming a residential sculptor has been realized 100 times over in projects all over Santa Fe.

In home-building, many decisions are based on the knowledge that can come only from doing, doing it once, doing it a dozen times.

But while experience does a lot for knowing what’s practical, there are intuitive qualities to building that are beyond the designer's vision alone.  The land beneath his feet has designs of its own for what would soon be built upon it, and Fischer is there, listening to the land, in project after project.

“One can’t do projects like these without knowing the land and knowing what it wants,” said Fischer from behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and a stubbly salt’n’pepper beard.  “You have to come up here and see it, stand on it, imagine how people will live here and what they’ll experience inside the home when it’s done.”

Read on for details on the Crescent House.

Read on for details on the Spa House.

412 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe, NM 87501 • (505) 820-0790