Mabel Dodge Luhan built the ‘Big House,’ at 240 Morada Lane in Taos, NM, between 1917 and 1922. It is now a National Historic Landmark. Employing traditional Puebloan construction methods, Tony Luhan oversaw the building of the three-story adobe house for Mabel and married her in 1923. The Big House, which backs onto land owned by the Taos Pueblo, has more than twenty rooms, including the Rainbow Room and a very large (28’x 15′) dining room three steps down from the living room.
In addition to the Big House, Mabel built a number of surrounding guesthouses, including the Pink Adobe, the house Willa Cather and Edith Lewis occupied in 1925 and probably 1926, during Willa’s writing of Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Mabel’s guesthouses and numerous bedrooms in the Big House allowed for a constant stream of guests, many of them famous, including D. H. Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, and Leopold Stokowski. Mabel lived in the Big House until sometime around 1954, when she moved into one of her smaller homes. Mabel died in 1962, Tony in 1963.
In Death Comes, book 2 in the series, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis are once again guests of this historic landmark, while they sleuth the macabre discovery of human remains.
From the novel, pages 21–23:
Their Circles Widen
Hole In The Wall
Eel Brook
Low Tide Seven Days Work
Swallowtail Lighthouse