Margaret Fulton Spencer (1882–1966) was a painter and early American woman architect who designed and built the architecturally unique dude ranch Las Lomas Estates outside of Tucson, Arizona.

[2] After college, Margaret continued her painting studies with the landscape painter William Langson Lathrop, who had founded an art colony near New Hope, Pennsylvania.

[5] However, Robert did not support her architectural career, so despite her ambitions she eventually switched fully into painting while he lived, focusing on landscapes and floral still lifes in an impressionist style.

[3] Margaret built her own separate studio on their New Hope property, complete with a kitchen and bedroom, and would retreat there to paint alone for days at a time.

Most were one-story cottages designed to blend with the landscape, but there were a few two-story towers as well, the entire group showing the influence of Tunisian vernacular architecture that she had particularly admired during earlier travels in Africa.

[1] In any case, Spencer's design program for the site stood in stark contrast to what was already becoming the dominant local aesthetic of tract houses and neatly organized subdivisions.

[4][6] Spencer ran Las Lomas as a dude ranch, and the cottages became a popular vacation spot during the 1940s and 1950s for well-to-do celebrities like Clark Gable and Carole Lombard (who honeymooned there) and Frank Lloyd Wright.

[5] She wrote an unpublished account of her years at Las Lomas, giving it the characteristically acerbic title "Dudes and Dopes.