Passive solar adobe home owned by Zen practitioner hits market for $650K in Albuquerque

Building a passive solar adobe home wasn’t the norm in 1982. But studio artist and Zen practitioner Susan Linnell, driven by a desire for efficiency and an interest in architecture, knew what she wanted and drew up the plans.

The home, located at 2941 Trellis NW in Albuquerque, was built by Linnell and many local craftspeople, including award-winning solar architects Richard Schalk and Edward Mazria. The two-story home is now on the market for $650,000 as Linnell prepares to downsize.

Linnell listed the two-bedroom, two-bathroom home for sale with Sotheby’s International Realty and broker Marsha Adams in May. It was previously listed by another broker for $688,000 in March, Adams said.

“It’s a hand-built house; you’ll never see one like it,” Adams said.

Mature cottonwood trees surround the 2,214-square-foot home, sitting on a quarter acre minutes from the Rio Grande Nature Center State Park. The home features a Danish wood stove, a primary bedroom with views of the Bosque and a studio with high ceilings and lighting “ideal for creative work,” the listing says.

Linnell — whose work has been exhibited in and collected by museums across New Mexico — has used the space as an art studio. A Zen priest in the Rinzai-ji order, Linnell also used the space as a Zen studio.

Linnell said the home and its environment provided “natural enrichment” for her art and made her feel as if she was in constant “conversation” with the trees, birds and light.

The home has a south-facing Trombe wall — a thick wall with a glass layer on the exterior that naturally absorbs and stores heat from the sun — that makes the home sustainable. The wall is a “passive” design feature, which Linnell said means there is no electricity or heat mechanism involved; the structure itself is the heat provider.

“At the time, I thought everyone was going to be building passive solar homes in like two weeks,” Linnell said, adding that she found the efficiency and lifestyle of the build “kind of thrilling.”

“It just makes you more alive to the weather,” Linnell said. The home has a swamp cooler, but Linnell said she often uses the windows and doors to regulate the temperature and uses about half a cord of wood for heat in the winter.

While Linnell is ready for her next chapter, she said she will miss the studio and the view from her upstairs window, where she could watch the Bosque’s cotton fall from the trees like snow.

“When I built this house, I had almost no money, and everyone told me I couldn’t,” Linnell said.

She bought the lot for $14,000 and asked local home builders if they could make the plans she drew up come to life. She said, in her mind, the only way she could survive as an artist was to not have a mortgage by building her own home.

More than 40 years later, the home is largely the same but has molded into what Linnell called the epitome of “Wabi-sabi” — a Japanese-inspired idea that beauty is found in imperfection.

“It’s kind of this reverence and aesthetic of something that’s beautiful because it is worn,” Linnell said.