Yucca Valley House 3 was designed by Oller & Pejic Architecture. It is located in Twentynine Palms, California, USA, and was finished in 2012.
Yucca Valley House 3 By Oller & Pejic Architecture:
“This project began with an e-mail and a meeting in the fall of 2008 for a house in Yucca Valley, which is located near Palm Springs, east of Los Angeles, in the high desert near the Joshua Tree National Park.
We had completed two projects in Yucca Valley and occasionally received inquiries about projects in the desert. Amid the economic downturn, these inquiries typically led nowhere. We had just had our second child, and things looked somewhat uncertain. We met with Marc and Michele Atlan to see if their project was real. Even from the first communication, Marc’s enthusiasm was noticeable.
After the first meeting, we shared a familiar aesthetic and process. After seeing the property, we knew this was a project like nothing else we had done, almost a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. There was no looking back; we immediately began work on the house.
Beyond the technical and regulatory challenges of building on the site, several previous owners had tried and given up; there was the challenge of how to build appropriately on such a sublime and pristine site. It is akin to building a house in a natural cathedral.
Start Of The Design Process:
Our client gave us brief but compelling instructions on how to build a house like a shadow. This was relevant to the desert area, where the sunlight is often so bright that the eye’s only resting place is the shadows.
Unfortunately, the site had been graded in the 1960s ′s, when the area was first subdivided for development. A small flat pad had been created by flattening several rock outcroppings and filling in a saddle between the outcroppings. To try to reverse this scar would have been cost-prohibitive and ultimately impossible. Addressing this in the new house’s design would be a further challenge. The house would be on a precipice with almost 360-degree views to the horizon and a large boulder blocking views back to the road.
A long research process began with the clients showing us images of houses they found intriguing. These contemporary houses showed a more aggressive formal and spatial language than the mid-century modern homes that have become the de facto style of the desert southwest.
We looked at precedents for how architects have dealt with houses in similar topography and found that they either sought to integrate the built work into the landscape. While on a completely virgin site, the lightly treading minimalist approach would be preferred, here we decided that the Western American tradition of Land Art would serve as a better starting point, marrying the two tendencies in a tense relationship with the house clawing the ground for purchase while maintaining its otherness.
The house would replace the missing mountain that was scraped away, but not as a mountain but as a shadow or negative of the rock; once the rock was removed, a hard, glinting obsidian shard was found.
The House Design:
We began fleshing out the spaces and movement through the house with the concept in place. We wanted the experience of navigating the house to remind one of traversing the site outside. The rooms are arranged linearly from the living room to the bedrooms, with the kitchen and dining in the middle. They all wrap around an inner courtyard, which adds a crucial intermediate space in the entry sequence and a protected exterior space in the harsh climate.
Marc succinctly summed up the living room as a chic sleeping bag. The space, recessed into the hillside with a solid earthen wall to lean back against as you survey the horizon, is a literal campsite whose precedent is the native cliff dwellings of the Southwest.
The dark color of the house interior adds to the primordial cave-like feeling. During the day, the interior recedes, and the views are more pronounced. The house completely dematerializes at night. The muted lighting and stars outside blend to form an infinite backdrop for contemplation.
The project would never have come about without the continued efforts of the entire team. Marc, Michele, and the architects collaborated on the design. The patience and dedication of the builder, Avian Rogers, and her subcontractors were crucial to the project’s success. Everyone who worked on the project knew it was something out of the ordinary and put forth incredible effort to see it completed.
Photos by: Marc Angeles
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