08/23/2026
Www.carvedcabinet.com loves the Fechin carving styles. We have recreated them for lucky clients as both doors and cabinetry.
A Russian painter carved every door in this Taos house by hand
You walk in for the paintings and end up standing in front of a closet door.
Nicolai Fechin built this house between 1927 and 1933, and he did the carving himself — every column, every stair rail, every door, the fireplaces too. He brought in sugar pine and poplar from the Northwest because it was cleaner and easier to cut than what he could get locally, and he wanted wood that would hold detail. What he cut into it was Russian folk carving sitting shoulder to shoulder with Pueblo forms and Spanish Colonial proportions, all of it wrapped in northern New Mexico adobe. On paper that should be a mess. Standing in the room, it isn't.
Six years of carving. Then his marriage came apart, he left for California, and he never built anything like it again.
What's the building in your town that people walk past without ever looking up?
