John Burcham for The New York Times
Isabro Ortega, right, a self-taught woodcarver, has been working on his home in Truchas, New Mexico, for 30 years. More Photos ?
AN important thing to remember about castles in the sky is that they were not always polished works of art. There was a time when the walls were unfinished, the living room floors incomplete and out front there was a pile of stones or wood scraps that might cause a knight in shining armor to take a header into the unbuilt moat.
This is how it is with the home of Isabro Ortega, which he calls his ?Casa de Las Nubes,? or ?House of the Clouds?: part masterpiece, part construction site, and very, very long in the making. Mr. Ortega, a 60-year-old self-taught woodcarver, has been working on his house for 30 years and jokes that it might be another 30 before it is finished.
The plaster on the exterior walls is what contractors refer to as first coat, or scratch; the stone wall outside the hand-carved front doors is an uneven affair barely a foot tall. Areas most builders would consider their first priority ? say, the living room and the kitchen ? remain unfinished, with chicken wire sticking out of a wall and notes scrawled on plasterboard, while spaces that any sensible person would deal with last, if at all, have been intricately detailed.
The master bathroom has a toilet-paper cabinet with doors carved inside and out, but the plumbing in the sink has yet to be installed. The kitchen has cabinets so beautifully engraved they could be studied like paintings, but the floor is dirt. And the pantry, home to beans and potatoes and bottles of Coca-Cola, is so magnificently finished, a tribute to beauty for beauty?s sake where few will ever see it ? because, really, who asks for a tour of the pantry? ? that the reporter, delighted, blows it a kiss.
?I do that sometimes, too,? Mr. Ortega says. ?I kiss my wood, anything that I carve. I?m in love with it. She?s my sweetheart, I am building her. She?s my angel, my inspiration.?
Truchas, population about 560, is just off the high road to Taos, about an hour north of Santa Fe. It has around 10 galleries, says Jeane George Weigel, an artist who lives here and writes a blog called High Road Artist. But there is only one small food store, Mr. Ortega says, which opens sporadically, at the pleasure of the owner.
The town?s claim to fame is that parts of the 1988 movie ?The Milagro Beanfield War? were filmed here. And the outlying area of Truchas, where the land drops down to canyon and Mr. Ortega is building his house, is so breathtaking it can make you gasp. The spaces really are wide open. You can see why artists come here and why, when the weather is fine, State Road 76 is the scene of an art collectors? crawl, with signs that read ?Metal Sculptor,? ?Woodcarver? and ?Artist at Work? dotting the landscape.
Two architects from Texas, Stephen B. and Stephanie M. Chambers, met Mr. Ortega while they were here researching the architecture of the Penitente Brotherhood, a Catholic lay group to which Mr. Ortega, a deeply religious man, belongs. He invited them to see his home, and they were impressed enough to feature it in an extremely unfinished state on their blog.
By the time the reporter arrives, however, the house looks more presentable. (Hearing that a visitor from the East was coming, 10 members of Mr. Ortega?s family spent three days putting it in order.)
Mr. Ortega, an ebullient man in baggy shorts and a T-shirt, at first speaks in an exaggerated voice like that of a cartoon character: ?Aa-eeee! You?re going to make me famous, like Eric Burden of the Animals, Mick Jagger of the Stones!? A nervous habit, this soon disappears. In his hand is a utility knife, the sort one uses to cut linoleum. He is working on a decorative cross he has been making as a gift for his visitor.
?I was in sixth grade when the Beatles came to America, then the Rolling Stones, the Animals,? he says. ?I was telling my sister just the other day, 90 percent of this house was built listening to British invasion music.?
The reporter would have guessed that, because Mr. Ortega is so devout, he would be playing religious music.
?Oh, I do sing a lot of Penitente songs when I am working, but the British invasion has always been my inspiration,? he says. ?I had never seen longhaired people, my dad always gave us haircuts and we were always bald. It was amazing to see all these longhaired people with a lot of talent.?
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