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Save this story Save Story Save this story “First-class Cabin,” by Hamish Bowles, was originally published in the December 1996 issue of Vogue.
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With his predilection for stars, beauties, and bodies on a heroic scale, it was perhaps inevitable that Herb Ritts would be drawn to the epic vistas of Santa Fe. In fact, the photographer discovered the area almost by accident when, five years ago, his private-jet-setting aunt, Allene LaPides, who has a local ranch, inaugurated her glamorous Santa Fe art gallery with her nephew’s “Men/Women” show. “Jack Woody, my publisher at the time, had bought a house there,” Ritts remembers, “and I just loved the feeling; something grabbed me. I felt very akin to the land.” On a “whim,” he set out to look for property. “I wanted something remote and not adobe’d out!”
What he found was a house high above the piñon-bristled plains and foothills of Santa Fe, on the side of a mountain that towers so high that its peak is sometimes veiled by mist. With its heart-stopping panoramic views shadowed by ever-changing cloudscapes out of Georgia O’Keeffe, he knew that this would be the perfect retreat from his hectic Los Angeles life.
Gradually, Ritts extended the property, last year acquiring 150 acres of forest land on the far side of the mountain. Here, on a rocky outcrop above the groves of towering ponderosa pines, a rugged ten-minute drive away from the main house, Ritts set an old chair so that he could contemplate the magnificent views. Serendipitously, an old well was discovered on the property. Because of this, Ritts began to consider the possibility of building a log cabin, a romantic retreat for himself and his friends.
After working with his mother, the interior designer Shirley Ritts, to transform the original house (Herb had envisioned minor adjustments, but his mother cantilevered the structure out on all sides to add volume, raised the ceilings, and installed her trademark spacious tiled bathrooms), Ritts went on to create, a little farther down the hill, the most glamorous pool house this side of San Simeon. It is here that Shirley Ritts sits discussing their latest collaboration.
A latter-day Anita Loos with vast, limpid eyes, a deep-chestnut pageboy, and dazzling reserves of energy, Shirley Ritts is slumped into a paisley velvet armchair, her Dietrich legs (clad in her habitual leggings and biker boots) slung insouciantly over one of the arms. She confesses that she is running on half-speed after working to get the cabin finished in time for Vogue ’s “totally unrealistic” deadline. If this is half-speed, gale-force Shirley must be something to be reckoned with.
Flashing an irresistible smile, Ritts mère playfully recalls her son’s original concept for this, the first house they built together (she has decorated his houses in L. A. and Malibu). “Herb wanted a ‘little’ pool house,” she says with a disparaging sniff, gesturing toward the epic land and sky beyond the windows that run the 45-foot- length of the drawing room. “Well, you can’t do ‘little’ here!”
She is equally wry on the log cabin’s history. Initially, Ritts decided to take on the project single-handedly. But after weeks of attempting to juggle his pan-global professional life and on-site meetings with the contractors, he turned again, inevitably, to his mother. It was over dinner, and Mother recalls it thus: “Herb said, ‘Mom. I have the drawings— please look at them.’ With that she takes the plans out of his little folder. I said, “No, honey, I wouldn’t think of it. It’s your project, and it’s great. I don’t know the first thing about a log cabin, and I don’t want to know.” Well, he nagged and whined, so I took the plans home. I said, “I don’t know when I’m going to have the time to look at them.” I was going to bed, and I saw those plans lying there, so I just had to look. Fatal . I mean, the only door there was the front door! I found myself at two o’clock in the morning with tracing paper and scale paper, playing with the plans. Herb asked me what I thought. I’m very diplomatic. I said, “It’s horrible!”
Her son’s original desire for a “little rustic shack with no electricity and a lantern” was clearly going to have to undergo some modification. A thoroughly chic log cabin is what he got, and rustic touches have been scrupulously confined to the structure itself. The pursuit of perfection began with the raw materials. With cabinetmaker Jeff Carbine and builder John Wolf at her side, Shirley combed the local lumberyards, personally selecting each of the individual planks required.
Herb, proving he is unquestionably his mother’s son, had some pronounced ideas of his own. The two fireplaces that anchor the cabin’s design were constructed not of the pink-gashed local stone on which the building sits but from the beautiful elliptical river rocks found in the dry arroyos of Villanueva. “Herb was real particular that they all be the same color,” recalls one of the stonemasons. Ritts and his mother shopped together for the cabin’s furnishings in Los Angeles, Paris, and points exotic. (“I’m always lugging things back from my travels,” notes Ritts. “It’s great to have those things around, reminding me of adventures.”) Late-seventeenth-century chairs sit on Agra rugs as elaborately worked as Mughal miniatures. Thirties French club chairs jostle the mission-style furniture of Ritts’s friend, the local Santa Fe-based designer Randolph Laub. Laub also provided most of the gutsy wood frames for Ritts’s extensive photography collection of vintage prints.
Surprises include Man Ray’s portrait of the thirties transvestite tightrope walker, Barbette; Herbert List’s surrealist study of a figure enigmatically swathed in pale cloth and holding a mirror; and Matt Mahurin’s muzzled bull terrier—a study in raw power. Ritts’s choices of his own works reveal his fascination with improbable physical perfection and abstract organic forms, and reflect the images in his current retrospective at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, “Herb Ritts Work,” on view through February 9, 1997. Also featured are his iconic images of the charismatic stars of our age. It is a culture Ritts was brought up in; Steve McQueen was a Brentwood neighbor, and Shirley’s decorating clients included Abigail van Buren (Dear Abby), Bobby Darin, and Cary Grant.
In spite of her illustrious decorating past, Shirley considers the log cabin “the crowning point in my career—eighteen men working to make that deadline! It’s a labor of love. It really all comes down to one sentence,” she adds with a sharp intake of breath. “It’s great working with your child. Great that he’s lucky enough that his talent has been recognized, and that he wants to invest in his environment and appreciate how he grew up… You know what I’m saying?”
Source: Lifestyle
