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"View Slideshow\n\nAs soon as I saw it, I knew I must have it,\" said Georgia O'Keeffe of the simple adobe house at Ghost Ranch, her first residence in her beloved New Mexico. O'Keeffe first stayed at the 21,000-acre dude ranch in 1934, having already spent several summers in northern New Mexico, captivated by the piercing sunlight, expansive skies and stark beauty of the high-desert landscape that have long attracted artists to the region.\n\nHere in this unpretentious, U-shaped structure, situated in a remote area of the ranch, O'Keeffe spent each summer and fall of most of the last 40 years of her long and prolific life. (She died in 1986 at the age of 98.) Its adobe walls seemingly an extension of the earth itself, the Ghost Ranch house (first shown in Architectural Digest in June 1981) nurtured her love of nature. Its picture windows frame views of majestic cliffs and mesas. O'Keeffe expressed her enthusiasm for her surroundings in a 1942 letter to the painter Arthur Dove:\n\n\"I wish you could see what I see out the window\u2014the earth pink and yellow cliffs to the north\u2014the full pale moon about to go down in an early morning lavender sky . . . pink and purple hills in front and the scrubby fine dull green cedars\u2014and a feeling of much space\u2014It is a very beautiful world.\"\n\nShe immortalized the landscape around her home, in all its shifting moods and colors, in paintings such as The Cliff Chimneys, 1938, Untitled (Red and Yellow Cliffs), 1940, and My Front Yard, Summer, 1941, which depicts a vista of her \"private mountain,\" the Cerro Pedernal. \"Out here, half your work is done for you,\" O'Keeffe said. She particularly delighted in climbing the handhewn wooden ladder to the roof, where she often entertained visitors and slept under the stars.\n\nA component of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center, which is affiliated with Santa Fe's Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, the artist's house at Ghost Ranch recently was restored to its original 1940s appearance, based on photographs from the period. The ranch itself, located some 60 miles northwest of Santa Fe, now functions as an educational conference center run by the Presbyterian Church.\n\nAt Ghost Ranch, Georgia O'Keeffe composed a life of Zen-like simplicity. The stark desert landscape corresponds to the austerity of the house and its interior as well as to her austere, self-sufficient image. O'Keeffe's minimalist aesthetic, rooted in her appreciation of Asian art and the design-driven teachings of artist Arthur Wesley Dow, with whom she studied at Columbia University in 1914\u201315, is evident throughout. The rooms are decorated with a careful assemblage of found objects and functional furniture and open onto a central patio, overgrown with gray-green chamiso and sagebrush.\n\nAdobe fireplaces and walls, and the viga-and-latilla ceilings typical of New Mexican adobe-style architecture, endow the house with a welcoming, earthy intimacy.\n\nThough modest in appearance, it exudes a certain harmony, as if every element were in its proper place, reflecting O'Keeffe's attention to detail. Her studio is a tranquil, whitewashed space with a hardwood floor and an adobe fireplace, above which hangs a bleached animal skull. Displayed on the mantel and windowsills, as well as on the naturally grained cedar ledge encircling the room, are gnarled branches and animal bones, reminiscent of the objects that she scavenged from the desert. The originals were donated, along with O'Keeffe's art materials and personal possessions, to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe by artist Juan Hamilton, O'Keeffe's friend and associate, and his wife, Anna Marie.\n\nAll of the artist's furnishings remain in the house, arranged as she once lived among them. In the studio, where O'Keeffe installed a picture window to maximize the desert view, are a scattering of rush-seated chairs, a modest wooden table and a red-canvas-and-chrome Le Corbusier\u2013style lounge chair. White cotton curtains shade the windows. The artist's easel, which supports a large, primed blank canvas, stands in a corner. A small wooden bench and a metal cart bearing tin cans of paintbrushes, tubes and other supplies are nearby.\n\nThe room adjacent to the studio served variously as a bedroom and a sitting room where O'Keeffe often listened to classical music. It is furnished with several rudimentary tables, a simple black chair, an old stereo and the plain desk on which O'Keeffe penned her numerous letters to her husband, photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, who never set foot in New Mexico.\n\nEven sparer in appearance is the artist's corner bedroom, in which two perpendicular walls of glass offer an unobstructed view of the red-and-yellow cliffs in what she called her backyard. A flagstone floor and a modest twin bed dressed in white cotton sheets add to the monastic aura of the space. Cedar wall ledges display seashells and rocks, another reminder of O'Keeffe's love of simple natural forms. \"O'Keeffe had a profound connection to nature, its forms, shapes and contours. Her main objective was to distill her experience of the world around her to its essence,\" says Barbara Buhler Lynes, curator of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and the Emily Fisher Landau director of its research center. \"The solitude and raw, elemental beauty she found at Ghost Ranch brought her closer to that essence.\"\n\nThe dining room is minimally furnished, with a long plywood table, tall-backed Chinese chairs and an Art D\u00E9co\u2013style floor lamp. Polished black stones, carefully arranged on the windowsill, glisten in the sunlight. Adjacent to the dining room are the kitchen and pantry, precisely ordered with the artist's spices, canning jars, baskets and myriad cooking utensils. O'Keeffe enjoyed eating in the vestibule off the kitchen, where she would sit on the banco (adobe ledge) and look out into the New Mexican desert, studded with wildflowers and stunted pi\u00F1on and juniper trees.\n\nThe Ghost Ranch residence represented for O'Keeffe \"a kind of freedom,\" she said, despite the hardships of living in isolation with generator-supplied electricity and without a telephone or fresh fruits and vegetables, for which she had to drive to Santa Fe on a dirt road.\n\nHer daily routine here was marked by her reverence for simple rituals and an inner clarity that allowed her to be fully present in each moment. She would rise early and take a long walk before breakfast, accompanied by her dogs. After breakfast, she would venture back into the desert for a day of painting, often using her Model A Ford as a portable studio. Upon returning home, she would take an evening walk before dinner. The lasting impression of O'Keeffe's legendary life and art, and the Ghost Ranch home that stood at its center, is that of a woman completely at ease with the natural world and with herself."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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