How Tom Ford Designed a 20,000-Acre Ranch That Still Holds His Imprint

A villa. An equestrian facility. Guesthouses. Staff residences. A private airstrip. And a full Western movie town used as a filming location for 3:10 to Yuma and Thor. Tom Ford's Cerro Pelon Ranch outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, covered approximately 20,000 acres and was designed by Tadao Ando, the Japanese architect known for the Church of the Light in Osaka and the Chichu Art Museum in Japan's Naoshima island. The ranch sold in January 2021 for $48 million, having been listed at $75 million in 2016 and reduced over four years on the market. It still carries Ford's design signature, because design at this level of commitment does not transfer with the deed. ## Tadao Ando's Architecture and What Tom Ford Asked of It Tadao Ando works in concrete, light, and silence. His Church of the Light (1989) in Ibaraki, Osaka uses a cross cut into a concrete wall as the building's only source of natural illumination. His Chichu Art Museum (2004) on Naoshima is built almost entirely underground, allowing light to enter through geometric openings in the ceiling. His vocabulary is reduction: take away everything that is not necessary to the experience. Ford asked Ando to apply that vocabulary to a 20,000-acre New Mexico ranch. The result, completed in 2012, placed a main villa at the center that reads as deliberately quiet against the high desert landscape. Concrete, natural materials, and a design logic that made the environment the principal feature rather than the building. Marlon Radziner's construction firm handled the build, which is the same firm that has executed architecture by Neutra, Schindler, and Lautner in Los Angeles. The ranch is, by any measure, the most architecturally ambitious private residential commission Ando completed in the United States. ## The Film Town: 3:10 to Yuma and Thor's New Mexico Scenes The Western movie town on the property is not decorative. Cerro Pelon's film town has been used as an active filming location. 3:10 to Yuma (2007), the remake of the 1957 Western starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, shot scenes there. Thor (2011) used the location for its New Mexico sequences. A private ranch in the Santa Fe desert functioning as a film production asset is a specific kind of American property story, and it fits Ford's sensibility exactly. Ford built his fashion career on understanding the relationship between performance, image, and the architecture of a space. His Gucci stores under his creative directorship in the late 1990s were designed with the same attention to surface and light as his own residences. The ranch film town is an extension of that logic at landscape scale. ## $75 Million Asking Price, $48 Million Sale, and What That Gap Means The ranch listed at $75 million in 2016 and sold at $48 million in January 2021, a reduction of $27 million over four years. This is not unusual for ultra-luxury ranch properties in New Mexico, where the buyer pool for any property over $20 million is extremely small and architectural significance does not translate directly to comparable sales data. The Ando commission added significant cost to the original development, and Ando's architecture does not produce a premium in New Mexico real estate markets the way it might in a gateway city. The property sold for what the market for 20,000-acre New Mexico ranches with Ando architecture could support, which is $48 million. ## What Stays After the Sale Ford sold his fashion brand to Ester Lauder Companies for $2.8 billion in late 2022. The ranch had already sold. What remains is the design logic that ran through both: a consistent understanding of how luxury is constructed, maintained, and eventually transferred. The @superniche.studios post that surfaced this property refers to it selling toward the end of 2025, but the sale actually closed in January 2021. The images remain accurate: Guido Mocafico, Corrie Photography, and Marlon Radziner documented the property at its fullest expression. What Ford built on 20,000 acres in New Mexico was a version of the same argument he made in fashion for twenty years: that taste, applied consistently, becomes architecture.