Someone else's world
A working organic farm around a 1932 hacienda in the Rio Grande Valley, looked after by the same family for half a century.
Los Poblanos, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Stayed, September 2026.
Why I like it
Los Poblanos feels like staying at a friend's ranch. Your luggage goes to your room in a wagon cart. The sheets are organic, the soap is made from lavender grown in the fields outside, and there's a sample of the farm's own tea in the room. The people who look after you seem less like hotel staff than like people who live here and are glad you came.
The place
The house was reshaped in 1932 by John Gaw Meem, the architect behind the Santa Fe style, for Albert Simms and his wife, the congresswoman Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms: thick adobe walls, wooden vigas, deep-set windows, all closed around a courtyard. Two years later Meem built La Quinta for them, a guest house for recitals and parties. In the 1970s Armin and Penny Rembe moved their family of six into the hacienda, and in 1999 they opened it as an inn with six rooms. It has grown since, but it's still the Rembes' place, and it shows. It's on the National Register of Historic Places, and it wears that lightly. The spa is in Meem's original residence. The bar, the Library, sits among the house's own books and old woodwork, and it's kept for the people staying there. In the colder months, some of the rooms have real wood-burning fireplaces.
What I loved most is that there's always somewhere to go. A corner for coffee in the morning, a bench in the garden, the Library at six. Peacocks and guinea hens wander between the buildings. Nothing has been styled to look rustic. It follows the seasons because it's a farm.
The table
Campo is the reason to stay a night longer. The kitchen calls it Rio Grande Valley cuisine: the menu follows the day's harvest from the farm, with meat from local and Native American ranchers and grains grown in the region. The chef, Christopher Bethoney, has been a James Beard semifinalist, and the drinks program has been a national finalist too. The cooks are young, mostly from New Mexico, and it shows in the food: it's some of the best I've had in any hotel, and better than most restaurants.
The land
Los Poblanos is a working organic farm, with lavender fields, cottonwoods and formal gardens, and the farm turns the lavender into everything from the soap in your bathroom to the products in the Farm Shop, so you can try something before you take it home. The grounds sit in the green valley of the Rio Grande, under enormous skies.
Who it's for
It's New Mexico's only hotel with two MICHELIN Keys, but the reason to go is quieter than that. For anyone who wants to step into someone else's world for a few days, and who cares about where things come from as much as how comfortable they are. It changes with the seasons, so it rewards coming back.
Somewhere to stay in, not a base for seeing everything else.
What it's made of
How a place makes you feel comes through the senses. These are the ones I remember.
- SightLavender, at first lightThe morning sun turning the fields gold
- SoundThe peacocksTheir crowing wail across the grounds
- SmellPiñon woodBurning in the fireplaces, and on the air
- TasteRisotto at CampoWith the season: mushroom, roasted pistachio, green garlic, San Joaquin Gold
- TouchLinen on the four-posterCool sheets after a day in the sun
- To take homeThe keepsakesThe Los Poblanos almanac, and a proper room key
- MorningA slow breakfast, then one of the hotel's bikes out along the fields, or a wander through the rose garden around the main house.
- MiddayAn hour in the Farm Shop, coming out with provisions for a picnic lunch under a tree.
- AfternoonA swim, and a treatment in the spa, inside a piece of architectural history.
- EveningA drink in the Library as the light goes gold, then dinner at Campo.
