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Stinson, who in the intervening years had married Miguel Otero, Jr., a New Mexican attorney and aviator who was the son of one of the state’s territorial governors. During her many years in Santa Fe, Stinson had become fascinated with the local architecture. No longer strong enough to fly, she had taken up her new hobby while at Sunmount, where she met John Gaw Meem, who had become a reknowned local architect and had offered to act as her mentor in what would become her new career. Stinson had built her own large adobe house in Meem’s Pueblo Revival style, and Dorothy asked her if she would design a modest home for her and Kevin on one and a half acres of piñon-studded land on the Old Santa Fe Trail road. The house was in a rural area on the outskirts of town, two miles down a dusty, red-dirt road, and many of her friends thought she was mad at the time. But the price was right—the land and construction came to $10,000—and Dorothy loved the view, which took in the blue Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east and the Sandia and Manzano ranges curving off to the south. On clear days, even Mt. Taylor, the legendary “Sentinel of the Navajo Land,” was visible, its snowcapped peak glittering in the winter sun.
    Dorothy and Katherine Stinson designed the house together, working every morning at the Oteros’ kitchen table. Dorothy had her heart set on an exact replica of an ancient Spanish-style farmhouse, laid out in a U shape with a traditional patio or interior courtyard, flat roof, thick walls, and a long sheltering portal. She insisted on incorporating into the architecture the old beams and other antique pieces she had collected, giving it the intentionally wobbly silhouette and rounded corners of time-worn adobes. She and Stinson went on shopping sprees while the construction was under way, scouring the countryside for distinctive elements. They salvaged the front portal from a crumbling rural farmhouse and found the rare, hand-carved corbels used to support it in the neighboring village of Agua Fria. A centuries-old door was bought for five dollars. To Dorothy’s delight, Stinson covered the living room floor with dark red bricks made by prisoners at the old penitentiary. The cozy 1,800-square-foot structure was completed in 1936, and Dorothy furnished it with native woven hangings and tinwork lamps she had acquired at the trading company. Thanks to the Depression, it was possible to find beautiful hand-woven Navajo and Chimayo rugs for three to five dollars at roadside gas stations on the outskirts of town, where the Indians sold them or traded them for fuel. She had one obsessive goal as she put in her garden and planted yellow Castilian roses on the border of her patio—that it be “a happy house.”
    The adobe house was a rare luxury. On the last Saturday of every month, Dorothy would take Kevin to town and settle her accounts at all the shops where she had charged things. By the end of their rounds, there was usually just enough left over for them to buy Cokes at the Capital Pharmacy before heading home. “Money was tight,” said Kevin. “My father left her pretty well fixed-up in that she had some stock, and a little something put away, so we were comfortable. But it wasn’t much.”
    In those days, there was only a small group of prominent “Anglos” in town, and as Dorothy already knew a number of them from Sunmount, she was quickly ushered into their tight-knit social world. She was close to John Meem, as well as his brother, both of whom lived in adjacent houses on the same street, only a short distance from her home. “She was never part of the ‘horsey’ set of well-to-do women from back east who kept ranches just outside town,” recalled Bill Hudgins, a boyhood friend of Kevin’s. “You could always tell those women by their tailored wool suits and mannish hats. Dorothy wasn’t like that at all. She was fun and informal and liked to wear bright Navajo skirts and fiesta blouses. She