Canyon Clarity: A Cinematographer Creates Her Dream Home in New Mexico

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Dyanna made her first film when she was nineteen and has been making films ever since. Her 2001 film Winter Dreams, chronicling the life of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, won a Peabody Award for its lyrical, inventive images. In 1998 New York Women in Film honored her with a lifetime achievement award.

An organic refuge

In 1992 Dyanna gave up her New York City loft and moved to the Southwest to lead a quieter life. She purchased a lovely hand-built house in Santa Fe (her “launching pad to the world”), then, in 1995, she purchased twenty acres of rugged river canyon. She found adjacent to it twenty-four acres and an ideal refuge: a tiny cabin perched on the edge of a granite cliff overlooking the Pecos River. She met the owners and caretook the place until she was able to buy it at the end of 1998.

“This is where I hide,” she says, “where I come for clarity. I love this little river canyon. It feels like an embrace.” For Dyanna this remote canyon offers refuge from the overstimulation of work. Here she lives submerged in nature’s time, hiking in moonlight, marveling at the nighttime sky; attending to meteor showers, northern lights, and full moons; and celebrating the solstices.

Andrew Geer built Dyanna’s cozy 205-square-foot cabin in the late 1980s for a woman who wanted a weekend retreat. She didn’t have much money, and Geer (now in demand as a custom builder of traditional New Mexico houses) didn’t have much experience. The woman quickly accepted his offer to build a cabin for under $4,000. He drew up a sketch (a ten-by-seventeen-foot room with angled roof and a five-by-seven-foot bed nook) and dove in, working completely alone for most of a summer. “It was really fun,” he remembers.

The original owner wanted the cabin to look lived in, so Geer fashioned simple shelter out of basic earthy materials—logs, adobe, rock—materials he still favors. “Mud is incredible,” he says. “It’s a local material, and you’ve got thermal mass with one-foot-thick walls. If they stay dry, wood and adobe last forever.”

The price Geer quoted for construction was mostly for labor, as he used recycled materials: pine doors and window frames, ripply glass, plank flooring, exterior decking. He bought the adobe block for $20 from a demolished 100-year-old house, agreeing to haul it himself. Rock came from the nearby road, sand from the arroyos, and mud plaster from the river. Even the corrugated steel roof is recycled. “I bought some plaster, some nails, and some cement, but that was it,” he says. “Materials cost around $400.”

Like America’s first settlers, Geer worked without electricity, employing old-fashioned construction techniques. Mortise and tenon joinery instead of nails, hand-carved pegs for hanging baskets, hand-adzed beams and hand-planed flooring (both with visible plane marks) give the place the look of a pioneer cabin.

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