IT’S EVIDENT HOW Blanche Blackmore Boyle (1839–1931) felt about the striking wooden portal her young renter had recently installed, free of charge, at 327 East De Vargas Street. The two were photographed outside the Boyle House around the time of the 1915 addition. A crumbling earthen wall serves as backdrop, pale tulips poke from the ground, and the proper-looking British widow stands beside the plucky adobe builder Kate Muller Chapman, then in her mid-20s and unmarried. Homeowner and tenant both peer distractedly at the camera, as if the photographer had interrupted a spirited meeting about other upcoming patio renovations.
We know Boyle (no relation to me) loved the portal. After all, the design was the height of fashion, having first been displayed in a 1912 museum show about the burgeoning Pueblo Revival aesthetic. She maintained the entryway for the rest of her life—and there it remains, adorning the adobe facade and spring-green front door of one of the oldest houses in Santa Fe. Now visitors can hold a pre-opera dinner party or set out an après-ski spread on that historic patio. Since a group of local investors acquired the home in late 2024 and leased it as a luxury vacation rental, the sprawling Boyle House can host up to 10 guests with five beds, four bathrooms, two patios, five parking spaces, a koi pond, a firepit, and a grill.
Kate Muller Chapman (left) and homeowner Blanche Blackmore Boyle stand outside the Boyle House.
Photograph courtesy of A Vacation Different.
The home is tucked like a secret behind a compound wall in the Barrio de Analco, Santa Fe’s most historic neighborhood. The wisteria that drapes around Chapman’s portal is so elderly it’s vining into the exterior walls. Inside, handmade square nails hold up hand-planed floorboards. Nearly a dozen whitewashed rooms reveal the wabi-sabi, differing heights of polished plank floors and latilla ceilings, along with Spanish Colonial fireplaces and Art Deco bathrooms.
Where some adobe walls are four feet thick, a harmonious silence descends. “It just feels like you’re kind of in a different world,” says Laura Decker, owner of A Vacation Different, which manages the property. The building is like a nesting egg of archaeological puzzles that spans centuries: One room served as a Western Union office during the Gilded Age, while pottery shards dating between 1200–1400 were found under the kitchen area. Recent owners have hewed much closer to preservation than renovation, but appliances and plumbing are in good working order. Photos of Boyle, Chapman, and other inhabitants from earlier eras are placed throughout, and an on-site book compiled by the current owners covers the place’s history.
The portal and patio add atmosphere.
Photograph courtesy of A Vacation Different.
“We don’t have a house like it in Santa Fe, in terms of that level of historically contributing detail and specificity,” says Stephen Post, the consulting archaeologist who helped the previous owners record the contributing materials of what is more properly known as the Arthur Boyle House (after Blanche’s husband, who died in 1910). “It’s one of the few places that has documented deep architectural and individual history, going back to the 1720s, 1730s,” Post adds, “even to the return of the Spanish settlers at the time of the Reconquest.” Dendrochronology—or tree-ring dating—of the home’s most elderly wood vigas dates to the late 1720s. Santa Fe’s Oldest House Museum, located 650 feet west of the Boyle House, has logs from the 1740s.)
These days, the short-term rental listing seems to cry out for bookings by history buffs, design nerds, and those who appreciate good old-fashioned togetherness. And where some preservationists might despair at the thought of a crown jewel falling into tourists’ hands—perhaps sticky from a visit to the nearby Kakawa Chocolate House—others see a silver lining.
“I think there really is value to [renting it out], for visitors and for the property itself, because it gets maintained,” says Pete Warzel, former director of the Historic Santa Fe Foundation. Unlike other nearby multimillion-dollar properties that have become vacation homes for out-of-state owners, he adds, “It’s a much better use of historic places when they’re being utilized—in a sense, teaching their history—rather than sitting empty eight months of the year.”
Read more: Discover more historic places to book across New Mexico.
Step back into the Old West at the St. James Hotel.
Photograph by Tira Howard.
OLD FAVORITE
In late 2024, father and daughter Chad and Alyse Mantz took the reins at the once-upon-a-time-in-the-West outlaw playground that is the St. James Hotel, in Cimarrón. “To walk the same hallways that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday did is very cool for us,” Chad says. The saloon’s updated spirits program is appearing on bourbon lovers’ radars, he says, while the restaurant is pulling out past menu classics that include the Pancho Griego, an enchilada plate with a flat-iron steak and an egg on top.
