There are homes in Santa Fe that announce themselves quietly. 3 East Golden Eagle is one of them. Positioned adjacent to the fifth fairway and green of the Signature Jack Nicklaus Sunrise golf course within Las Campanas, this estate sits with the particular confidence of a property that was designed, from the beginning, to belong exactly where it stands.
The rendering above captures that quality: a structure in full conversation with the landscape around it, the mountains at a distance, the portals and patios reaching outward toward the light.
Architecture and Setting
The home was conceived and constructed on speculation by a three-partner venture that included designer and builder Joe Cohen, originally brought to New Mexico by Armand Hammer to oversee the development of the United World College in Montezuma, NM. Speculative builds in Las Campanas, at this scale and on this siting, are relatively rare; most estates here are custom-commissioned by their eventual owners. What Cohen and his partners produced instead was a canvas: a home fully resolved in its proportions and materials, ready to receive its first family without compromise.
The architecture reads in the Pueblo Revival register that defines Santa Fe’s most enduring residential work. Thick adobe walls, portal sequences that track the movement of the sun, indoor-outdoor rooms that treat the high desert light as a building material rather than an afterthought. From numerous outdoor terraces, views extend to distant mountain ranges on multiple axes. Las Campanas, elevated and unhurried at the city’s northwestern edge, provides this kind of visual reach reliably; this particular parcel uses it with uncommon generosity.
The Sunrise course itself, one of two Jack Nicklaus Signature courses within Las Campanas, runs along the estate’s western boundary. The fifth hole places the green in proximity without imposing on the property’s sense of privacy, a balance that site selection and landscape design, working together, manage to sustain.
Ownership History
The original partnership consisted of Mac Grimmer, founder of Morning Star Gallery in Santa Fe, Jordan Davis, an entertainment industry producer, and Joe Cohen. The partnership, upon completion of construction, sold the property to its next owner and first occupant, Bud Adams.
Bud Adams was a man of genuine consequence in American sports history. Adams founded the Houston Oilers as an original member of the American Football League (AFL) in 1960, and he remained the franchise’s owner through its relocation to Nashville in 1997, where the team became the Tennessee Titans. He was one of the last surviving founders of the AFL and one of the architects of the merger with the NFL that shaped professional football, as the country has known it for more than fifty years. His ownership of the Sunrise fairway estate reflected the pattern of many who find Santa Fe in the later chapters of a large public life: the city offers something quieter than the lives they led, and something more permanent.
Las Campanas: The Context
Las Campanas occupies roughly 4,700 acres in the high desert northwest of Santa Fe, with the Jemez Mountains anchoring the western view and the Sangre de Cristo range closing the eastern horizon. The community was designed with relatively low density, and the two Signature Nicklaus golf courses — Sunrise and Sunset — give it a physical structure that most gated communities in the Southwest lack. Properties here are not interchangeable. Siting, view corridor, and adjacency to one course or the other distinguish them meaningfully from each other.
For those drawn to the golf and club life alongside Santa Fe’s cultural depth, Las Campanas has offered a specific combination of amenities inclusive of swim, tennis, fitness and spa center and extraordinary equestrian facilities unavailable anywhere else in northern New Mexico. Webster Estates has represented and sold a substantial number of lots and estates within the community over the years; the particulars of each have always mattered more than the general address.
A Note on the Rendering
The pen and ink rendering reproduced here is part of Webster Estates’ ongoing Artistic Renderings series, a project that pairs original artwork with historic and notable properties Webster Estates has represented and sold. The goal is not documentation but evocation: to capture the feeling of a property at a particular moment in time, with the light and land it actually inhabits.
To inquire about current Las Campanas listings or to discuss the sale of an estate within the community or elsewhere in northern New Mexico, we welcome you to contact the Webster Estates team. You may also browse our current portfolio at websterestates.com/properties.
The Webster Estates Team: Chris Webster · Patti Webster · Christopher Webster III · Paisley Mason Webster
Webster Estates is the real estate brokerage arm of Webster Santa Fe, a team of Associate Brokers at Sotheby’s International Realty – Santa Fe. The team has operated from 54½ Lincoln Avenue on The Plaza since 1976.
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