For rent: A one-bedroom coyote house

[TAOS, NEW MEXICO] Johnny DeFeo didn’t think building a house shaped like the head of a coyote would be all that hard when he first started out four years ago. He already had a perfect plot of land, he said, on a corner of the property where he lives in the ranching town of Arroyo Hondo, just outside of Taos, New Mexico.

Plus, he had cash to spend. He won a contest, sponsored by Airbnb, that awarded US$100,000 prizes to people who pitched unusual ideas for creating novel spaces that might be rented through the online platform.

As a painter who spends a lot of time outdoors capturing fantastical scenes of the landscape and wildlife, coyotes were already a part of his visual repertoire. The artist, 41, calls himself an “adventure painter” and has trekked deep into national parks throughout the West, carrying his easel and brushes. He had rendered scores of coyotes, wolves and wild horses on canvas, he reasoned, so how hard could it be to convert his work into three-dimensional form?

“This was going to be my very first sculpture, and it just happened to be a house,” he said in an interview inside the structure, which was completed in January. “And for some reason, I didn’t see the flaw in that idea.”

Only now is DeFeo asking the questions that might have been better-answered at the start. What does an artist know about turning a “janky clay model” of a coyote into a building safe enough to shelter humans during a snowy, northern New Mexico winter? Or about bending steel reinforcing bars into the shape of pointy ears and a protruding snout that could get covered in plaster to give the house its distinct profile?

Or about all of the other tasks he took on mostly by himself, including permitting, landscaping, tiling, fence-building, hiring engineers or dealing with puzzled looks from neighbours wondering what, exactly, he was doing as he blew his way through his contest winnings, and then emptied his personal bank accounts to finance a project that he estimates cost about US$350,000 in the end.

“I also had to take out a line of credit on my house,” said DeFeo, who was born in Berlin, Connecticut, and received his master’s degree in painting and drawing from the University of Colorado before cofounding Adventure Painting, a travelling artist residency. “And I borrowed money from my parents, too.”

The 550-square-foot structure stands two stories tall on a flat parcel of high-altitude desert covered in scrubby sagebrush. Visitors enter by walking through the open maw of the creature, passing by upper and lower fangs and through a wooden front door. Immediately inside, there is a pass-through galley kitchen that leads to the living room. The house’s walls are constructed from a product called Pumice-Crete, a mudlike material made from pumice and concrete, with a sprinkling of mica that sparkles when the light shines on it.

DeFeo kept the interior simple, and in the pueblo-inspired style of architecture that is common in the Southwest. The colours are earthy and muted, the edges of walls and passageways are rounded and soft and there is no trim around windows or doorways. The ceiling is lined with planks of ponderosa pine that sit atop exposed lodgepole beams.

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There are some dazzling details, including the round, amber-coloured windows that serve as the coyote’s eyes, which were made by Justin Olerud, a Los Angeles-based glass artist.

There is the bathroom shower, lined floor-to-ceiling with river rocks, into which DeFeo integrated tiles in the shape of animal fossils. A set of stairs leads to a loft bedroom that has its own front porch – cut into the upper side of the coyote’s protruding nose. The views are the sort that make the Taos region a haven for tourists who appreciate the way the rocky, red soil of New Mexico meets its big, blue skies.

The artist said he does not expect to make a profit renting out his coyote casita on Airbnb – currently about US$400 for a two-night stay – maybe just enough to pay off the loans he took to build it. He is now offering his services as a consultant for others who want to make unusual projects.

“What I’d love is for that to be the role I play in someone else’s life who wants to do something crazy like this,” he said. “To help them shape that idea from a dream into something tangible.” NYTIMES