After spending 8 years restoring the Landes mansion, it was featured on the Galveston historical society's 1998 tour of historic homes and a record 7000 people came through the house over two week ends. After that I moved off  to Mexico and built Savasana. The indian name refers to a yoga posture, sometimes called the `corpse posture', or sometimes as `the last thing you do before you rest. I was retiring to Mexico  and this was to be the last house. Of course it would not be. Savasana is right across from the Ya Cool lagoon and in the old days before development I could walk over and be the only person at the lagoon and have it to myself. All that has changed. Next, I moved up the road in north akumal , just off the beach, and built Konomi. I got the name from a book of Japanese architecture that referred to the teen as "original style'' and original it was. I designed the house which was essentially Victorian in its arrangement and features but now it was translated through local Mayan labor and built in the manner of the yucatan, so what might have been gingerbread in boston, here was interpreted in sapote and shaped with machetes. What might have been slate on the double gallery porch is now grass, and the posts are of-ancient chicle trees, that still bear the scars of the days when the chiceleros would gather the sap for chewing gum . Even the 13 custom stained glass windows I did for the house I did in the anglo Japanese style of the aesthetic movement. The architect was my good friend and neighbor, the accomplished surrealist painter, Enrique Alcaraz, who calls architecture, "architorture" because it is only a means to an end, to his true love of painting, . . . the mark of a true artist. One day a group of photographers and models from the british cosmopolitan magazine dropped by. They had been in Tulum looking for a place for a photo shoot for a fashion lay out and had not found quite what they were looking for, when they saw Konomi they asked if they could do it there, so for a day their models and photographers and make up people used the house for the shoot that was several full pages in trier may 2003 issue. Konomi had been carefully planned. I brought down from the states, 19th century doors, I salvaged from old Paris storefronts., vintage lighting, and two 40 foot containers of antiques. The outside color was carefully selected to be a blend of all of the colors of the surrounding jungle and vihuko vine was allowed to grow on top of that. Sadly, tasteless new owners have obliterated much of the original charm. foliage taken down. the house painted a ghastly chalky white and now only the most common of items inside. These pictures were taken in the glory days, right after it was built, and filled to the gills with antiques. Now, I am back in the states, and my focus and mission are in my nature retreat, my art , animal rights,  and the continuing quest for truth, art, and beauty.