Revisiting Gene Hackman’s House in Santa Fe

Gene Hackman, the two-time Oscar winner with more than 75 film credits amassed over his 40-year career, died at his Santa Fe home along with his wife, the pianist Betsy Arakawa, on February 26, 2025. He was 95.

Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, on January 30, 1930, and grew up in Danville, Illinois. As a young adult, the screen legend resisted his calling, instead considering a career in journalism. “But I kept rediscovering the fact that I wanted to be an actor,” Hackman told Architectural Digest during a 1982 tour of his Montecito home. “Finally the desire became so strong that I just gave in to it. It took me a while to get started.” A 19-year-old Hackman enrolled in acting classes at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he met and befriended Dustin Hoffman. Ironically, the future film icons were named “the least likely to succeed.”

Hackman was nominated for five Academy Awards and won for his roles in The French Connection (1971) and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992). His breakout role was in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, for which he earned a best supporting actor nomination. He went on to build a wide-ranging body of work that included a turn as villain Lex Luthor in Superman and the eponymous patriarch in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. He retired from acting in the mid-2000s, after which he turned his attention to painting and writing. Between 1999 and 2008, Hackman cowrote three novels and penned two by himself in 2011 and 2013.

He is survived by three children from his relationship with Fay Maltese, to whom he was married from 1956 to 1986. He wed Arakawa in 1991.

A little over a decade ago, GQ asked Hackman how he’d want to be remembered. He said, “As a decent actor. As someone who tried to portray what was given to them in an honest fashion.” Asked to sum up his life in a phrase, he wryly responded, “‘He tried.’ I think that’d be fairly accurate.”

Read on to revisit the 1990 Architectural Digest tour of Hackman and Arakawa’s Southwestern-style ranch. —Katie Schultz

Given the choice, Gene Hackman would rather remodel a house than build one from scratch. “I think it's like being an actor. I interpret what's already there,” he says.

Hackman's career has ranged from the introverted eavesdropper of The Conversation to the villainous Lex Luthor in Superman. He won an Oscar in 1971 for The French Connection and has been nominated for three others, most recently for his role as an FBI agent in Mississippi Burning. He has spent most of his working life on the move from one role to another, one location to the next. In the same spirit, he has moved from one house to another—he is currently in the tenth house that he's created. “I don't know what's wrong with me,” he says wryly. “I guess I like the process, and when it's over, it's over.”

His newest house is on twelve acres of pi?on-covered hilltop a few miles north of Santa Fe, with a 360-degree view that stretches as far as the mountains of Colorado. He was attracted to Santa Fe after working on a couple of movies there. “It had a kind of magic in it,” he says. He bought the property for its location, then called in Santa Fe architects Harry Daple and Stephen Samuelson of Studio Arquitectura to help him transform the existing house into the personal setting he envisioned.

“The house was horrible,” says Samuelson. “It was a 1950s block building that had sat empty and had deteriorated. But it was a great site, and the foundation had been well placed on the land.” Hackman and Betsy Arakawa, with whom he shares the house, were not interested in recreating pure pueblo architecture. Instead, their priorities were light and soaring space, an open floor plan, and French doors, features not always easy to achieve in traditional adobe construction. The house, therefore, is a blend of styles—part pueblo, part colonial New Mexico, part Spanish Baroque. “It's not purist at all,” says Samuelson. “It's more primitive, like a barn converted into a house, massive and cozy at the same time.”

Gene Hackman’s House in Santa Fe

The first step toward spaciousness was removing 90 percent of the roof, so that ceilings could be raised to as high as twenty feet in some parts of the house. The interior spaces were rethought, and walls came tumbling down to accommodate Hackman's wish for generous rooms: Three small rooms became the centerpiece of the house, a vast living area with tree-trunk columns, irresistibly comfortable sofas, and an ultramodern stereo system to fill the house with the music Hackman loves. “I wanted a big room with a great-hall feeling, with other rooms opening off it, not closed off with a lot of walls,” says Hackman. “It's totally different from my other houses. The Montecito house [see Architectural Digest, November 1982] was very formal.”

Hackman brought a moviemaker's sense of illusion to the finishing of the interior spaces. What he wanted was the subtlety of a house that has been finished over decades, gradually acquiring its own range of layers and patinas. “The house is new, but from its newness we tried to bring it back a hundred years or more,” he explains. “The plaster was very good, but I wanted water marks, as if there had been leaks over the years. I wanted the plaster darkened in some places, as if by smoke.”

It took some persuading, he admits, to convince the plasterers that this was really what he wanted, but the result is walls that shade from one color to another, defining and shaping spaces without breaking up the feeling of openness. In the entrance hall, for example, teal gradually turns into tan, a color bridge between outside and inside. In the same spirit, new ceiling beams were rehewn, burned, beaten with chains and repainted several times, with layers of different colored paints applied and removed again and again.

Hackman also wanted a traditional stamped-tin ceiling in certain rooms of the house. When no commercially available patterned tin pleased him, a local artisan was called in to do exactly what he envisioned.

Hackman was involved in every aspect of the house. He determined the floor plan for the architects, specified each detail in the kitchen, even helped out physically with the demolition. He's an accomplished painter, and he occasionally mixed colors on his own palette to show the workmen precisely what he wanted.

Although he was on location for most of the time that the house was being built, Hackman remained in touch with everything that was being done. “He's a deeply involved client, very artistic, very keen on details,” says Samuelson. “We had to call him and send sketches constantly. If we didn't, we'd get a call in a few days: ‘Hello, this is Gene Hackman. Do you remember me?’ ” In addition, Betsy Arakawa was on the site much of the time, consulting with Hackman by phone and sending photographs of the work in progress.

When it came to furnishing the house, they did not want a pure Santa Fe look. Instead, Hackman explains, “We bought a few things in Santa Fe. Other things came from auctions in New York, an antiques shop in Germany that Betsy and I found, and from Los Angeles. It's a nice combination of soft southwestern pieces and hard-edged antiques.”

Their new acquisitions, as well as furniture from Hackman's Montecito house, were brought together by Santa Fe designers Ken Figueredo and Glynn Gomez, described by the couple as “our interior collaborators.” The softness of Santa Fe colors and contours and the traditionalism of European antiques were linked by colorful, large-scale accessories. As in the architectural style, there was no attempt to turn the house into a museum of New Mexican arts and crafts. Some of the most effective pieces come from Morocco, including intricately painted spice shelves that look like mosaics. The house was designed as a haven for the brief periods—perhaps two months scattered through the year—when Hackman is not on location. At these times, the emphasis is on comfort and quiet, undisturbed by the demands of houseguests and constant entertaining. If he's in a painting mood, Hackman might get into his pickup truck and drive toward the mountains with his oils and canvas. Otherwise, he spends hours reading and listening to music in the living room, while the desert changes color and the clouds move through the mountains around him.

RELATED: See all of Architectural Digest’s celebrity homes.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest