Below, we revisit ADs 1998 tour of Kilmers Pueblo-style Santa Fe home, where he lived for over a decade. Katie SchultzThis article originally appeared in the April 1998 issue of Architectural Digest.To even have a chance of doing anything unique, you have to know who you are, says actor Val Kilmer. As a result, you should live where you feel most yourself.For the star of The Saint (1997) and At First Sight, that is Santa Fea place where the facts of land bump up against mysticism on a daily basis. Take the mountains in New Mexico, says Kilmer. There's something very hard and dangerous about the cliffs herethey're not solid granite, so rocks can move and you can die climbing. Yet in the midst of that jagged canvas you'll suddenly come upon this crazy, Barnum and Bailey burst of wildflowersDay-Glo orange sprinkled with purplethe perfect bouquet. He pauses, smiling. Theres irony herelike in life.For the classically trained actor who electrified Jim Morrison on-screen in The Doors (1991) and then went on to re-create the Caped Crusader in Batman Forever (1995), irony is familiar terrain. Known for his brilliant, often tempestuous talent, Kilmer has staked his claim in territory as unpredictable as the man himself. In New Mexico it's easier to understand that there's more than one absolute, says Kilmer, whose love affair with the Southwest dates back to his California boyhood and family camping trips to Arizona and New Mexico. (Kilmer grew up in the San Fernando Valley, next door to Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. When Trigger died, they stuffed himstanding on his hind legsand put him in the living room, he recalls. Then their dog Bullet died, and they did the same thing to him. We were always afraid that if Dale died, we'd walk in one day and find her, stuffed and holding a tray, in the kitchen.)Then there's the weather here, he continues. In the course of a day it can be clear, get cloudy and snow and then get sunny and the snow melts. You never know what to expect.Eighteen years ago the only thing the actor expected when he drove through Santa Fe on his way to New York and the Juilliard School, where hed been accepted as a drama student, was a couple of nights layover in Santa Fe. Three and a half months later he reluctantly drove out of town, beginning a commuter romance between Santa Fe and wherever he happened to be working at the time.Seven years ago he put down official roots by buying twenty-seven acres of prime property in Tesuque (home to Ali MacGraw and Gene Hackman, among others). Though the land was spectacular, the house on it wasn't, as Kilmer and his then wife, English actress Joanne Whalley, moved into what he describes as a seventies condominium-looking wreck with glass walls. (Albeit one with a colorful past: The former tenants left bullet holes scattered throughout a bedroom.)