William Penhallow Henderson House

Tent Rock, Inc. began restoration work on the William Penhallow Henderson House nearly two decades ago, in partnership with the Historic Santa Fe Foundation. The property sits on Camino del Monte Sol, at the heart of the historic district that takes its name from that street, and is one of the foundational adobe homes of Santa Fe’s early-twentieth-century art colony.

The house was built in stages between 1917 and 1928 by William Penhallow Henderson and his wife Alice Corbin Henderson — a painter and a poet who were central to the circle of artists and writers gathering on this side of Santa Fe. Their home, in the Spanish Pueblo Revival style, set the architectural tone for the colony that grew around it. The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.

By the time the property came to us, it had taken on close to a century of high-desert wear. Our guiding principle for the restoration was to keep as much of the original house as the house itself would allow: where original material could be stabilized, we stabilized; where it could not, we replaced — in kind, in scale, and in the same tradition the Hendersons had built in. The defining piece of the project was the portal beam — a span of more than thirty feet, milled from a single timber we sourced out of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and hand-dressed to match the original woodwork. Across every other element of the work, the same standard held: historically accurate, visibly continuous, no shortcuts.

Tent Rock, Inc. self-performed the craft work that defines this kind of adobe property: the wall plane restoration, the on-site hand-made tile, the hand-planed wood elements, and the woodwork that interacts with the original adzed ceilings. We coordinated stone masons, adobe experts, and our in-house woodworkers as a single ready-made crew rather than sub-by-sub.