The Inn of the Five Graces

One Address at a Time

Most hotels are built. This one was assembled.

In 1993 Ira and Sylvia Seret bought a neglected run of adobe and river rock buildings on East De Vargas Street, a few minutes’ walk south of the Plaza, and spent three years joining them into something that could take guests. It opened in 1996 as Seret’s 1001 Nights and took its present name in 2002. The buildings were houses before they were rooms, which is why the arithmetic of the place is so irregular. Suites run from roughly 466 to 2,225 square feet, because those are the shapes the original rooms came in.

The street is not incidental. The Barrio de Analco was declared a National Historic Landmark district in 1968, and it was settled in the early 1600s by Tlaxcalan and other Indigenous laborers who had come north with the Spanish. The name is Nahuatl and means, near enough, the other side of the water. That is precisely what the neighborhood is: the far bank of the Santa Fe River, looking back at the Plaza.

Kabul to De Vargas Street

The more interesting question is how two people came to own that much of one block.

In 1968 Ira Seret went to Kabul to source sheepskin coats for Anne Klein. He stayed about fifteen years. Sylvia joined him in 1974, they built a carpet workshop in Balkh in the north of the country, and together they designed for Anne Klein, Oscar de la Renta, Bloomingdale’s, and Stark Carpet. In 1978, after a coup, the family left Afghanistan with a young son and a very large collection.

They chose Santa Fe because the high desert light and the mud-walled architecture resembled what they had just left, and they opened Seret & Sons to hold what they had brought. That sentence is worth sitting with. Two people compared Kabul to Santa Fe and found the resemblance close enough to build the rest of a life on it. Anyone who has spent time with the adobe vocabulary of this city will understand the comparison faster than they expect to.

The Rooms Are the Collection

Walls are finished in traditional adobe mud plaster. Past that, the interiors are inventory: Central Asian and Tibetan textiles, carved doors, devotional and tribal art, cut stone mosaic set into floors and bathrooms. None of it is a reproduction of a Santa Fe interior. The organizing principle is one couple’s eye rather than a period or a region, which places it closer in spirit to the Girard holdings at the Museum of International Folk Art than to any other hotel in town. The inn is the only Relais & Châteaux member in New Mexico.

The Corner of the Block

The proof of how far into this neighborhood the hotel reaches arrived in December 2022, when the Serets bought the restaurant on the corner rather than build one of their own.

The Pink Adobe has stood at 406 Old Santa Fe Trail since 1944, when Rosalea Murphy, a painter and art dealer, opened it in a hacienda a great deal older than her menu. The Serets had been its neighbors for nearly thirty years. They reopened it in early 2023 with the Dragon Room bar beside it, the recipes and much of the interior left where they were. Guests can reach it through a courtyard. Everyone else walks in off the street, as they have for eighty years.

That is the case for staying here. From the front door it is a walk to the Plaza, a walk to Canyon Road, and a walk into the historic east side. Of the properties we cover in hotels and resorts, this is the one set into an existing block rather than onto open land, which is the whole distance between it and Bishop’s Lodge or Four Seasons Rancho Encantado.

Common Questions

Where is the Inn of the Five Graces?

At 150 East De Vargas Street, in the Barrio de Analco, a National Historic Landmark district on the south bank of the Santa Fe River, a short walk from the Plaza and from Canyon Road.

Is the Pink Adobe part of the hotel?

It is under the same ownership. Ira and Sylvia Seret bought the restaurant and the Dragon Room bar in December 2022 and reopened them in early 2023. Both remain open to the public and not only to guests.