Robert, an ophthalmologist at Southwest Eye Clinic, and Becky, who helps with the business and is a member of various volunteer organizations throughout the community, knew each other in high school, but they attended rival schools. In college they had a couple of classes with each other at UTEP, but they were still just casual acquaintances. It wasn’t until Becky moved back to El Paso from Germany that they started dating after Becky’s cousin re-introduced them. They dated for five years then, in 1980, they married and had two children – Stefanie, 25, a graduate of UT San Antonio and Jeffrey, 19, a student at the University of Southern California. In 1987, they moved from Boston to Las Cruces, eventually building their current home in 1998.
“It’s been a good place to live. It’s worked well for us as a family,” Becky says.
The couple sketched their home and turned it into a functional design with the help of draftsman Alex De La Peña of DLP Building Company before giving it to Pino Home Builders (a builder no longer in Las Cruces). The five bedroom, five-and-a-half bathroom home includes a home theater room, a great room with easy access to the kitchen, a bar area and a loft. Seating areas are not left to the formal living room or the separate formal dining room alone but are found throughout the home. One seating area in particular across from the formal living room highlights the green and vibrant landscape, cabana and pool with large picture windows. Very few rooms in the house are without large windows to utilize the view.
“We picked the lot because of the view and the central location,” Becky says of the home situated above the city with the entire Mesilla Valley before it. “It’s a big house, but it’s comfortable. We wanted a place that was livable – someplace where we could put our feet up on the chairs.”
Becky enlisted the help of Nancy Charles-Byers of Charles, Inc. for the interior of the home, filling it with elegant decorations that give it character. The high ceilings in the living room add to the feeling that the home is incredibly spacious, although taking up more than a square of an acre already proves that point.
All in all, Robert and Becky found a way to combine all the luxuries of a large home with the comforts of a humble home, a mixture that suits them perfectly.
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