The McNary House was the grandest house in El Paso when built. Designed by Hunt of Pasadena, it is an austere, tile-roofed Mediterranean villa, where a one-story Tuscan peristyle screens the central atrium, around which the two-story wings of the immense, U-plan house are configured. The house is set in four acres of grounds defined by the long oval of Crescent Circle in the Austin Terrace subdivision. McNary, a banker and lumberman, was also an investor in the subdivision. Landscape architects Howard and Smith transformed McNary’s house site from desert scrub into a lushly planted garden, replete with a tennis court, greenhouse, stable, and swimming pool. Marshall Field and Company of Chicago designed the interiors. In 1935 a Mexican community of Franciscan Fathers bought the house for a third of what it cost McNary to build; it has been a seminary for the training of Mexican priests since then.