Bishop’s Lodge

The Chapel Came First

On a hill above Tesuque Creek, four miles north of the Plaza, there is a small whitewashed adobe building with a Gothic wooden altar inside it. Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the first archbishop of Santa Fe and the man Willa Cather later based a novel on, built it in 1874 as a private retreat and called the place Villa Pintoresca, the picturesque house. Two rooms and a chapel, with flower gardens and orchards around them.

The chapel is still there. It was entered on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. Everything else on the 317 acres arrived afterward, and the order in which it arrived is the reason this property is worth an entry at all.

Eighty Years of Thorpes

Lamy died in 1888. The land went through a succession of owners and spent part of that stretch as a dairy farm, which is a useful corrective to any account of the site as continuously sacred. The Pulitzer family bought it in 1915 and used it for three years as a western house. In 1918 they sold to James R. Thorpe, a Denver mining heir, who restored the chapel, added buildings around it, and gave the property the name it still carries. By 1928 he was running it as a guest ranch.

The Thorpe family held it until January 1998. Eighty years, one family, one business.

That is the fact worth carrying out of here. Santa Fe’s hospitality economy did not begin with resorts; it began with guest ranches, with people who came north for a season rather than a weekend and rode out from a shared table. Bishop’s Lodge spent most of the twentieth century as one of them, and it is the rare property in the county where the continuity is in the use of the ground rather than in the deed.

Six Years Dark

The lodge closed in 2015. Plans changed hands, construction did not begin until the summer of 2019, and the restoration ran years past its first announced date. Bishop’s Lodge reopened on July 1, 2021 under Auberge Resorts Collection.

What came back is about a hundred accommodations in low adobe buildings: guest rooms with terraces and fireplaces, suites, freestanding casitas, a twelve-bedroom bunkhouse, and a two-thousand-square-foot Chapel House. The restaurant, SkyFire, was conceived with the chef Dean Fearing and will have its own entry here. The work stayed in the material language of the region, which is less a compliment than an observation: on this particular hillside there was never a plausible alternative.

Four Miles Out

The property borders the Santa Fe National Forest, which is the practical reason the outdoor program is not decorative. Horseback riding, fly fishing, archery, and guided hiking are what the land in fact supports, and they are close to the same list the Thorpes sold in the 1920s. A guest ranch was always an argument about what a year here actually feels like, month by month, rather than a set of rooms.

Four miles is a specific and forgiving distance. It puts Tesuque at the bottom of the road and the Santa Fe Opera a few minutes further along the same northern corridor, while the Plaza stays close enough that no day has to be planned around getting back to it.

We open hotels and resorts with three properties because they answer three different questions, and this is the one whose answer is time. The Inn of the Five Graces was assembled out of a neighborhood. Four Seasons Rancho Encantado was built to face a landscape. Bishop’s Lodge is a hundred and fifty years of one hillside being put to use, and the chapel on the hill is the receipt.

Common Questions

How old is Bishop’s Lodge?

The chapel on the property was built in 1874 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. The site has taken paying guests since the Thorpe family opened it as a guest ranch by 1928, and it reopened under Auberge Resorts Collection on July 1, 2021.

Is Bishop’s Lodge in Santa Fe or in Tesuque?

Its address is 1297 Bishops Lodge Road, Santa Fe, about four miles north of the Plaza. The setting is the Tesuque valley, on 317 acres bordering the Santa Fe National Forest.