SANCTUARY SAVED

When Jean-Baptiste Lamy arrived in Santa Fe in 1851, it was a Wild West town. And the unruly residents weren’t just brawling cowboys at the corner saloon — they included members of the clergy, whose only supervision lay 1,500 miles away in Durango, Mexico. Nearly 25 years after Lamy’s arrival, in 1875, the Roman Catholic Church elevated Santa Fe to a diocese and placed Lamy at the helm as archbishop. The Frenchman known for bringing that era’s priests into line also planned two notable, still-standing Santa Fe landmarks: the Romanesque revival Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi and the neo-Gothic Loretto Chapel. Lamy also made his mark a few miles north of downtown at what is now Bishop’s Lodge, Auberge Resorts Collection.

Seeking a place for quiet contemplation, in the 1860s, Lamy purchased 152.8 acres of land near Tesuque Creek from Natividad Romero and his wife, Maria Vitalia Garcia, for $80. There he oversaw construction of an intimate, three-room building with an entry hall opening to a chapel, with a sitting room and vestibule on the right and a bedroom complete with kiva fireplace on the left.

When he died in 1888, his Villa Pintoresca, as it came to be known, became the Catholic Church’s property. The church sold the land and chapel to private owners in 1909. Over the intervening century, the chapel languished for several periods, even as a bustling private home and later a guest lodge expanded around it. The Pulitzer family constructed the property’s original lodge as their summer home, where they dutifully visited from the East Coast between 1915 and 1918 before James R. Thorpe, a Denver mining magnate, purchased it. The Thorpe family managed the ever-expanding Bishop’s Lodge Ranch until 1998.

In 2015 HRV Hotel Partners acquired the property before partnering with Auberge Resorts Collection in 2016. The partners hired design firm HKS and renowned architect Nunzio M. DeSantis to re-envision the resort. When it reopened in 2021, the resort evoked a pastoral Northern New Mexico village of a century earlier, with rolling topography and outlying buildings sharing a harmonious aesthetic. The property has 20 new buildings. Five original structures include the original lodge, now home to SkyFire Restaurant, and the Lamy Chapel, which became a historical centerpiece for the property’s reboot.

When renovations began, the chapel was crumbling. The cracks in the cedar shingle roof were letting moisture seep in. Moisture was disintegrating the adobe walls from within. The stone portal and exterior wall were flaking away and pulling the structure out of plumb.

The investment to preserve the structure was “significant,” according to Bishop’s Lodge representatives. The recent renovation involved installing a new shingle roof, shoring up the portal floor and wall, and peeling back layers of carpet and linoleum. Still, according to Spears Horn Architects, which documented the historical structure and outlined the renovation plan, “it is important the building retain its irregular, antiquated, and very historic character.”

It does — as a peek inside during the Parade of Homes reveals. The chapel is open to the public for tours 10 a.m.–5 p.m. on the first weekend of the parade, Aug. 11–13. The resort extends a special promotion to Parade of Homes visitors: during the first weekend, they can receive a complimentary appetizer for two at SkyFire Restaurant with the additional purchase of food or beverages by showing their parade ticket.