Santa Fe, the long way.

Hotel Chaco is the rare hotel that's a reason to visit, not just a place to sleep. It was Gensler's first project in New Mexico, and the design team began by traveling to Chaco Canyon — the UNESCO World Heritage site where, roughly between 850 and 1250, the Ancestral Puebloans built a monumental city aligned to the movements of the sun and moon. The hotel translates that into something wholly contemporary: pale stone masonry, viga-and-latilla ceilings, a lobby built around a kiva, and a building oriented, quite literally, to the light.

What sets it apart is the art. Instead of prints, the hotel commissioned contemporary Native American artists — a bronze by Joe Cajero of Jemez Pueblo anchors the lobby, a ceramic Guardian by Roxanne Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo watches over the front desk, and even the staff uniforms were designed by Taos Pueblo's Patricia Michaels. Book dinner upstairs at Level 5, the rooftop, and time it for dusk — when the Sandia Mountains turn watermelon-pink.

Walk Old Town in the evening and book a table at High Noon, set in an adobe built in 1785 — one of the original structures of the old villa, and about a century older than the fictional town in the film it shares a name with. The Villa family has run it since 1974. You'll eat under viga ceilings on brick floors polished to a shine, beside kiva fireplaces and carved santos set into the walls — green chile on nearly everything, and more tequila behind the bar than anyone should attempt.

Before heading north, ride the Sandia Peak Tramway. It's the longest aerial tram in the Americas — 2.7 miles from the edge of the city to a 10,378-foot crest, climbing four thousand feet in about fifteen minutes as one car rises and the other falls, passing midair somewhere near a thousand feet above the rock. Sandia means "watermelon," for the color the range turns at sunset, and from the top — fifteen to thirty degrees cooler than the desert floor — the view runs some eleven thousand square miles, clear to the Sangre de Cristos above Santa Fe. Which is exactly where you're headed.

In Santa Fe, make home base the Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi, a few steps off the Plaza — small, hushed, and beautifully made, with kiva fireplaces, hand-troweled walls, and the kind of service that has your name by the second morning. It's the sort of hotel that quietly makes the whole city feel like it belongs to you.

Even if you're not staying, three properties reward a visit — for a drink, a spa afternoon, or simply the architecture.

Santa Fe is one of the great art towns in America, and Canyon Road is its spine — a half-mile of adobe compounds holding something close to a hundred galleries, one flowing into the next. Give it an unhurried afternoon: wander in and out, and expect at least one room to stop you cold — the kind of work you keep turning over in your mind long after you've left.