Sitting among tangles of oak and Monterey pine, on the lip of a canyon in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Owl House is part art, part architecture, its rich contradictions impossible to grasp at a glance. The redwood structure looks different from every angle, emerging onto the street like a fox's den hollowed out of the brush, or perched like a massive nest from the canyon behind. Where it looms largest, however, it is also generously glazed, giving it the all-seeing gaze of its namesake. Inside, it feels exposed, enclosed and, in some places, both. Sculptural, layered and textural, it offers a series of inhabitable collages that are rigorous in their geometry, reverent toward nature, but playful nonetheless.

Discover this refreshed Mickey Muennig house in California

Designed in the early 1970s by architect Mickey Muennig, the house was restored in 2024 by landscape architect Bernard Trainor of Ground Studio. Then last year, its interiors were renovated by Wallpaper* US400 honoree Nicole Hollis' San Francisco design studio for a pair of empty nesters, who use it as a weekend retreat. Like so many things that come to define the identity of a place, the house's Californian aesthetic was created by a transplant.

Muennig, who would come to be known as ‘the man who built Big Sur', moved to California from Missouri and the Midwest. Having studied under Bruce Goff, he travelled to the nearby Esalen Institute in 1971 for a Gestalt therapy workshop and never returned home. Instead, he began to design unusual buildings, using organic forms and local materials that bridge indoors and out. On a ridge above Big Sur, Muennig embarked on private architectural experiments that embraced nature, light and views: a stone and glass teepee with a bed suspended in its conical crown surveyed the sea, while a boxy house nearby featured tiered, spiralling redwood ceilings and a living room bisected by running water.

Meanwhile, he was also designing lush coastal homes and celebrated Northern California destinations: the Baths at Esalen, the Hawthorne Gallery, and the plush Post Ranch Inn, whose guest rooms took the form of treehouses and burrows with wildflower-sown roofs. Architecture became an extension, even a totem, of the landscape, a link between human and nature. The Owl House had presaged themes that Muennig would play with in much of his later work.

Also a transplant, from the southeastern coast of Australia, Trainor became a temporary steward of the house in 2023. His restoration stabilised and protected materials ranging from the copper roof to wooden decks. ‘It was a passion project that combined art and design, and it brought together years of learning along the way,' he says. In late 2024, when a longtime client bought the house, Hollis and colleague Adele Cunningham set to work with great restraint. The result is clarifying, drawing the architecture to the fore and making room for its new residents.

Essential to Muennig's design are moments of sculptural intensity. The entrance operates as a human-scale collage featuring radial trusswork, a semicircular skylight, layered doorways, cut-away walls, and a tilted demilune clerestory window. Wooden collages by Japanese artist Kishio Suga, chosen from the couple's existing collection by consultants Mary Zlot and Sabrina Buell, resonates with the house's language of fragmentation and flow.

To their credit, Hollis' team cleared the space instead of filling it. They opted for materials that complement rather than contrast, and fewer furnishings that, no matter their age, might have always been there. ‘It's a small house, so I didn't want to overwhelm or overthink it,' says Hollis. ‘You don't want to crowd that architecture. You want it to sing.'

Hollis understood the architecture as tactile as much as it is visually extreme. Texture here serves as a unifying principle, with expressive wooden ceilings and terracotta floor tiles. ‘We thought, are the tiles too busy? They're so graphic,' Hollis recalls. ‘But then we all got used to them, and now we can't imagine the house without them.' Harmonising with the redwood and the brass of the fireplace, colourful textiles add cosiness and energy to each room.

Like texture, geometry is palpable throughout, from the hexagonal tiles to the curving walls. In the kitchen, revitalised cabinetry is faced with vertical slats in varying widths, while a globe pendant and loop-base table echo the house's porthole windows. Because the plan resembles a nautilus shell (with bedroom walls curling into cylinders that contain baths), Hollis commissioned rugs from Vaheed Taheri and brought in rounded furnishings with circular or semicircular oversize pulls.

To keep the interiors relaxed, Hollis' team either met the house's whimsy halfway with curved pieces and happy hues, or stepped back to let it play out. They didn't touch the mushroom-shaped window above the kitchen sink, or the mezzanine's pony wall, cut away in a shallow arc that Hollis describes as ‘a smile'. But they brightened the living room with a green sideboard by Matthew Raw and a red sofa by George Smith: ‘Items that one might not want to live with every day,' she says, ‘but that help create an escape from everyday life.'

Outdoors, the garden continues to be a passion project for Trainor, who wove together plant species such as banksias and persimmons to make it feel ‘as if you were walking through a painting', and designed a cedar and brass fence that gambols across the undulating terrain, echoing the language of the house. The result is not a backdrop but a blossoming that feels as whimsical and wild as the architecture it embraces.

nicolehollis.com

bernardtrainor.com

This article appears in the August 2026, Creative America issue of Wallpaper*, available from 2 July in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

For the first time in three decades, one of La Jolla's most celebrated architectural treasures is coming to market. The Thomas C Kravis, MD Residence – a remodel completed between 1976 and 1987 by the organic architect Kendrick Bangs Kellogg – sits on Vista Del Mar Avenue, steps from the legendary Windansea Beach.

Although the home dates to the 1940s, its story truly begins in the 1970s, when physician Thomas Kravis purchased the property and turned to Kellogg (1934-2024) to reimagine it. At the time, Kellogg was at an early stage of his career – before the sweeping, almost sculptural fluidity that would define later works, such as the Doolittle Residence in Joshua Tree and the Yen Residence in La Jolla. Working within the constraints of a standard city lot, he demonstrated here that organic design doesn’t require a grand scale to make an impression.

The property announces itself through its stacked wood fascia, which frames the rooflines and signals something a bit different from the surrounding streetscape. Inside and out, Kellogg deployed his signature textured concrete – a recipe entirely his own – that originates at the interior fireplace and flows outward into the landscape through planters, water features, garden walls and seating areas. Natural wood and earthy tones lend the home a particular warmth, a quality that has made it a perennial favourite on the La Jolla Modern Home Tour.

The residence gained a further dimension in 1998, when the parents of the current owner – architect Yum Kee Fu and his wife Susan – undertook a two-year renovation that wove nature-inspired Asian detail throughout. Their most exquisite contribution is the upstairs suite, where artisan-crafted interior doors feature intricate wood inlays. The work was guided by Yum Kee Fu's philosophy that any design should 'create and meet the peaceful environment and peaceful nature of life'.

The residence comprises three bedrooms and three bathrooms, with ocean and sunset views throughout. The primary suite – accessible via an exterior stairway and complete with its own rooftop deck – functions equally well as a self-contained one-bedroom apartment.

The Kravis Residence is a home shaped by three distinct creative hands across five decades, each leaving its own mark. Available off-market, it is a rare opportunity to own a work of enduring architectural significance in one of Southern California's most coveted coastal neighbourhoods.

The Kravis Residence is listed with Keith York at Agents of Architecture.

A fan of the architect? Tour another Kendrick Bangs Kellogg California gem

This is the latest instalment of The Inside Story, Wallpaper’s series spotlighting intriguing, innovative and industry-leading interior design.

Nestled at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains in Sierra Madre, a 1947 adobe home – a traditional building method using sun-dried bricks of organic materials – has been reimagined. Removed from the noise and polish of Los Angeles, this neighbourhood is shaded by California oaks, eucalyptus and pine, and shares its hillside with bears. It's an unusual setting for a design story.

The home’s transformation began with a fire that destroyed much of the structure, leaving only the original adobe brick wall standing. Rather than rebuild from scratch, designer Kirsten Blazek of A1000XBetter chose to work with what remained.

‘The overall vision was to maintain as much of the original character and style of the home as possible, while making it more functional for modern living,’ she explains. New rooms were added – a kitchen, a primary suite, a family room – though the expansion was restrained. ‘We worked mainly within the original footprint,’ the designer notes, ‘only adding a small amount of square footage for the primary closet.’

On the original adobe side, the layout was left untouched. The hallway windows, original to the 1947 build and ‘one of [Blazek’s] favourite features’, were preserved. ‘I wanted the house to feel like a modern California hacienda,’ she says of her guiding aesthetic, ‘and embraced that through every colour choice and finish.'

That palette draws directly from the landscape. Dunn-Edwards paints in warm, grounded tones – including an exterior shade named ‘Wild Horses’ – echo the surrounding terrain and scrubland. ‘I very much gravitate to an earth-based palette,’ says Blazek, ‘and the location at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains made that feel completely natural.’

Recreate the mood

The interiors, meanwhile, speak to a lifelong passion. ‘I have a deep connection with the American Southwest and have long collected Native American and western-influenced art and objects,’ she says. Yet the rooms never tip into pastiche. Midcentury furniture – sourced from MidcenturyLA, Amsterdam Modern and Lawson-Fenning – grounds the collected pieces with clean, modern lines. Rugs from Pampa and Salam Hello add warmth underfoot; drapery by Zak and Fox frames the windows. ‘I never want my work to feel too referential,’ Blazek reflects. ‘I love midcentury lines, so there's a pleasing blend of both genres throughout.’

Among her favourite moments is the dining room fireplace – original to the house, but updated with dimensional tile from Lofa Tile. Nearby, a framed print by artist Mark Maggiori anchors the wall. ‘It's one of my favourite pieces,’ she says. ‘I was grateful to finally find the perfect place for it.’

Between the ancient craft of adobe and the clean geometry of midcentury design, this renovation represents both preservation and reinvention – a modern hacienda rooted in its land, its past and the strength of Blazek’s vision.

Designed by architect John Lautner in 1962, in the Los Angeles suburb of Beverly Crest, the instantly recognisable Sheats-Goldstein Residence has long played a starring role not only in architecture history books, but also in popular culture (from The Big Lebowski to Helmut Newton photographs). Originally commissioned by the Sheats family, the house and estate were acquired in 1972 by businessman and basketball fan James Goldstein, who, recognising its importance, bequeathed it to LACMA in 2016.

Explore the Sheats-Goldstein Residence by John Lautner

The modernist architecture fabric's longevity and the site's continuous functionality and health owe much to Kristopher Conner and James Perry, of LA firm Conner + Perry, who have overseen works and designed additions there since 2015 (both had worked for Lautner's associate Duncan Nicholson, who continued working at the property following Lautner's death in 1994).

Putting their intimate knowledge of the estate to good use, the pair not only worked on the restoration of the main residence, but also completed the most recent phase of the ongoing entertainment complex project, known as Club James, which is tucked underneath the estate's infinity tennis court on an adjacent site bought by Goldstein.

It now complements the residential element perfectly, providing users with a fully functioning nightclub, including a VIP room/library, offices for the owner and his assistants, an outdoor terrace with dining and kitchen facilities, and a pool and spa.

Conner and Perry are becoming the go-to architects for Lautner restoration, having recently completed the refresh of another of the modernist's masterpieces from the early 1980s, Lautner's Castle, a private home in California.

‘What Lautner understood, and what working on the Sheats-Goldstein house proves every day, is that great architecture isn't a finished object. It's a living idea,' Perry says. ‘We've been privileged to be part of that conversation and the continuously evolving work.'

conner-perry.com

One side of California architect Wallace Neff's practice was designing mansions for Hollywood A-listers like Groucho Marx and Judy Garland. Another was was designing wildly innovative houses. One such home is for sale right now in Pasadena, California for $1.95 million, the last of eight 'Airform' houses. Neff designed this two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in 1946 for his brother Andrew.

As a sideline to his tony mansion-crafting work Neff (1895-1982) conducted a number of experiments starting in 1932 with what were known as 'balloon' houses. What is that? Well, in this case, industrial-strength neoprene nylon was inflated to a desired dimension and then topped with Gunite, a type of concrete sprayed from a hose. Add a layer of insulation and another layer of concrete and you’d have an Airform house. They could be completed in as few as 48 hours.

Gunite enables easier curves than casting or pouring concrete does and is most commonly used in swimming pools. A number of architects made use of it, from Richard Neutra to Jacques Couëlle and John Covert Watson. In the case of Neff's Pasadena house, city officials were unsure it would hold up; Neff found a Caltech professor to vouch for its stability, and it stands as a futuristic presence still today.

The dome makes for a dazzling interior, 12 feet high at its apex with partitions for the two bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen. Neff observed in Architectural Forum in 1946, 'The absolute absence of girders, columns and jigsaw trusses startles the imagination.' The rooms are about half of the slices of this circle, rotating around a remarkable cantilevered chimney.

The owners, Priya Girishankar, a media executive, and Damon Cleckler, a Carvana product executive, were well familiar with the 1,204 sq ft house from two decades of visiting a friend there who died in 2023. Cleckler tells Wallpaper*, 'The moment you walked into the home, you knew how incredible and special it was. It blew our minds.'

They suffered another loss of their own when their Gregory Ain house was destroyed in the 2025 Eaton fires. Girishankar notes that this work was 'our path forward after losing the Ain house. The decision to buy and restore the Neff bubble was a labour of love. It allowed us to bring back the house to a place that we hope and believe Neff envisioned when he built it.'

The house required a little work, with electrical, heating, air, and plumbing updates, as well as concrete repairs. Their most consequential restorative act was healing a decades-old dent from an HVAC unit. With technological advances it was now possible to remove these and utilize a ducted mini-split. Cleckler says, 'This would allow for the shell to return to it's original glory as a standalone unit, unencumbered by the steampunk-like barnacles of big aluminum tubes, conduit and metal boxes.'

The property sits on a 9,000 sq ft lot and also contains a 1,000 sq ft detached studio space with its own living area, bathroom and bedroom. Fifteen feet beneath that is another atomic era surprise: an Airform bomb shelter.

Cleckler explains, 'It's not showy. It's not a statement. It's a type of solution that came with affordances not typically found in a rectilinear box. It's more organic than organic architecture, and therefore it has a kind of unusual purity to it.'

Rudolph Schindler designed houses 'as if there had never been houses before,' famed architecture critic and writer Reyner Banham once said. Bold and exciting, it's a statement that captures the Austrian-born, California architect's oeuvre and attitude. Schindler's modernist architecture is found in great numbers in the City of Angels, a known treasure trove of modernist houses. He crafted homes big and small, designing some 100 residential projects, many radical and thought-provoking, as he sought to challenge the era's norms through his Los Angeles houses.

Who was Rudolph Schindler?

Rudolph Michael Schindler (1887-1953) was born in Vienna into an artistic family with a deep appreciation for craft. He studied at TU Wien (the city's well-regarded University of Technology) before attending the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1911. In 1914, he moved to the USA, where he started working for Frank Lloyd Wright, whose work he discovered while still in Austria via the Wasmuth Portfolio, a folio containing 100 of Wright's lithographs, published in 1910.

Schindler worked on the Hollyhock House project in Los Angeles, among others, during his time at Wright‘s studio. Soon after, he left and completed his personal home on Kings Road in Hollywood. It marked the beginning of Schindler's mission to develop his own, distinctive iteration of modernist residential architecture.

Rudolph Schindler's architecture style

Known for his characterful residential projects, organic spaces and built-in living scenarios, Schindler stood outside the modernist mainstream of the time, which was largely represented by his fellow architect and friend from Vienna, Richard Neutra.

Schindler‘s projects broke away from the austerity of functionalism and focused primarily on the emotional aspect of architecture and the spatial character of a living environment. Influenced by Wright, his mentor, Schindler created homes that draw on the principles of organic architecture, and the influences of 20th-century Austrian architect Adolf Loos; in particular, his idea of a more vertical hierarchy of spaces, known as 'Raumplan'.

Schindler's career and portfolio

The lack of standardisation in Schindler's work and his moves away from modernism's functionalist roots led to his work not being included in the seminal exhibition International Style at MoMA in 1932. Still, until his death, Schindler built around 100 residential projects.

Schindler homes vary in style and materials, representing the architect's explorations and his architectural evolution over time. His work went through different stages, mostly defined by the materials he used – from his early 1920s concrete houses, he progressed to plaster-covered designs in the 1930s, and through to wood and stone organic creations towards the end of his career, in the 1940s and 1950s.

16 Rudolph Schindler homes in Los Angeles

Curator, architecture historian and writer Adam Štěch toured Los Angeles in search of Rudolph Schindler homes. Here, he captures for us 16 of his most exciting creations.

Kings Road House (Schindler House)

When? 1922

Kings Road House was one of Schindler‘s first independent projects. It reveals the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, but Schindler transforms that into a distinctive style of his own. Initially, the building functioned as a home and studio for the architect, his wife, Pauline, and another couple, Clyde and Marian Chace. The living space is arranged as two L-shaped pavilions around a large garden, with floor-to-ceiling windows and exposed wood structural details. With its openness and Japanese sensibility, the house is a remarkable emblem of the modernist movement. It was restored in 2003 by architecture studio Marmol Radziner. Today, it is owned by Friends of the Schindler House, with support from the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK).

How House

When? 1925

Located in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, where Schindler built many of his projects, the How House was completed in 1925 for railroad heir James Eads. It is made of redwood beams, poured concrete and stucco. Interconnected cubes contain variable spaces differing in height and atmosphere. The spaces feature overlaying forms and lines, seen more clearly in the geometric beam work of the large living room, with its iconic corner window in a subtle wood frame. Designer Taska Cleveland recently restored the house for a new owner, respecting its original soul.

Herman Sachs Apartments (Manola Court)

When? 1926

Commissioned in 1926, The Herman Sachs Apartments were built for German painter Herman Sachs. Composed of rectangles on the steep site, the complex was expanded between 1934 and 1940 to a total of sixteen cityview residences.

William E. and Stephanie Oliver House

When? 1934

Oliver House represents one of Schindler‘s career highlights. The house, built on a steep plot in the Silver Lake area, is set back on the plot and is reached by a set of steps lined by elegant tubular metal handrails. Inside, the architect created an open, flexible space with multifunctional furniture units, such as the living room seating corner with built-in tables and shelves.

Walker House

When? 1936

Walker House shows Schindler’s ability to build on awkward, even downright tricky, sites. The residence faces the Silver Lake reservoir and is elevated over the steep hill on pillars. Its geometric facade, with a variety of offset rectangular windows, faces the water, while the entrance is located on the top floor on the other side. The lower level contains bedrooms furnished with Schindler’s signature built-in furniture. Walker House was bought by journalist and modernist design aficionado Andrew Romano a decade ago, who has been working on its restoration since.

McAlmon Duplex

When? 1936

The McAlmon Duplex includes two private homes on one lot. Originally built in 1923, the structures were remodelled by Schindler in 1936. Large overhangs and a powerful use of geometry place this house as one of Schindler‘s best interpretations of International Style. It was also influenced by the Dutch movement De Stijl.

Bubeshko Apartments

When? 1938–1941

With its decorative concrete caps on the garage walls, crafted by sculptor Gordon Newell, this project evokes the precast concrete blocks of Frank Lloyd Wright's Mayan Revival architecture. The Bubeshko Apartments were commissioned by Anastasia Bubeshko and her daughter Luby.

The Samuel T. and Pauline Falk Apartments

When? 1938

Commissioned in 1938 by Samuel T. and Pauline Falk, the Falk Apartments are composed of rectangular volumes that perfectly fit into the steep hill of their Silver Lake area plot. Inside, four different living units unfold.

Guy C. Wilson House

When? 1939

Another Schindler‘s residential gem in Silver Lake, Guy C. Wilson House is a definitive example of modernist composition, with its recessed and stepped facade composed of rectangular volumes, large window openings and an unusual, overhanging roof. Inside, one can find a multi-level white space with built-in wooden furniture.

Pearl Mackey Apartments

When? 1939

Owned by the Austrian Museum für angewandte Kunst (MAK), the Pearl Mackey Apartments are currently used to host artists' residencies. A crisp, white, International Style facade with large windows conceals duplex apartments behind it, featuring ingenious built-in furniture elements.

Droste House

When? 1940

Built for the Droste family in Silver Lake, this house contains one of the most authentically preserved interiors by Schindler. The green composition of overlaid and protruding rectangular volumes, typical of Schindler’s late 1930s style, stands out for its large window in the middle of the street-facing facade, which gives the house a panoramic view over the Silver Lake reservoir.

Kallis House

When? 1946

Located in Studio City, Kallis House and its art studio were commissioned by production artist Maurice 'Mischa' Kallis. One of the most organic and playful Schindler houses, it features angled walls and fittingly bespoke-designed interior furnishings. In 1993, Schindler's associate Josef Van der Kar cleverly converted the house's open patio between the living quarters and the art studio into an entertainment and family room.

Roxy Roth House

When? 1946

Commissioned in 1945 by screenwriter and actor Roxy Roth House and located in Studio City, this is another feast of late-career Schindler work, full of surprising forms and organic-inspired spaces. The composition includes a curved car shed converted into a studio. It has recently been restored by architect Barbara Bestor, following a past restoration, in 1998-1999, by architect and contractor Jeff Fink. The house is currently for sale, listed by Crosby Doe.

The Laurelwood Apartments

When? 1948

Located in Studio City, The Laurelwood Apartments comprise two terraced blocks containing two-bedroom flats divided by a central patio. The project's total of twenty units was constructed using modular techniques to address post-war material shortages.

Adolph Tischler House

When? 1950

Designed for craftsman, designer and inventor Adolph Tischler, this house is one of Schindler’s last projects in which he experimented not only with space and construction but also with colour and light. Schindler covered the main living room at the top of the structure with blue translucent corrugated fibreglass panels - this caused the light to take on a deep blue hue inside. Tischler also designed some elements for the house, including a metal fireplace.

Phillip and Phyllis Schlessinger House

When? 1954

The very last project of Rudolph Schindler can be found in Los Feliz and was completed one year after his death. The house is defined by a cascading facade, which internally helps create a cosy, organic living room area.

For those feeling the pull of the open expanses of the American West Coast, a Linda Taalman house would be the perfect place to set up camp – and such a home might indeed be within reach, as a lone, off-grid structure nestled among the wilderness of Lone Pine, CA has just come on the market.

Explore this Linda Taalman house for sale in Lone Pine, CA

The project was designed by Taalman on a piece of land between Eastern Sierra and Death Valley, and gifted to one half of a client duo, Karen Rathburn, by her father. Karen and Gary Rathburn built the home as a true labour of love over eight years (four of them literally building it by hand). Surrounded by magnificent views, this architecturally precious home was worth the wait – offering a cinematic experience as well as a wildfire-prepared shelter with minimal footprint and a strong sustainable ethos.

Taalman is known for her brand of desert modernism, which combines deceptively simple and open forms, often in utilitarian glass and steel, with sustainable architecture principles – including prefabrication and modular design to avoid waste and site disturbance in a way that adapts to the arid landscapes she often works with.

The clients have strong family roots in the area, so cared about creating a home that is respectful to its site, while allowing them to take it in and celebrate its unique nature. Large windows and open terraces work towards that, blending inside and outside seamlessly.

The result is not only striking to live in, but also deeply embedded in its context. Vistas of the region's peaks are on offer, including Eastern Sierra, Lone Pine Peak, Mount Langley, Owens Lake, Inyo Mountains and Alabama Hills. The last is a stone's throw away and the legendary filming site of some 400 movies (many classic American Westerns among them), TV shows and commercials – adding a precious layer of popular culture to this property too.

Agents: Jeremy Howe Steenblik and Nate Cole with moderncaliforniahouse.com

Price: $1650000 USD

Address: 3800 Granite View Dr, Lone Pine, CA

Set within Napa Valley’s storied To Kalon Vineyard, Robert Mondavi Winery is widely credited with putting California wine on the global map. When it opened in 1966, its mission was as much cultural as oenological: to welcome the public into the experience of wine. Its iconic tower and sweeping arch – designed by midcentury designer Cliff May – served as both beacon and invitation, signalling a departure from European-inspired models toward something distinctly Californian.

Over time, however, as the brand expanded and the campus grew in an ad hoc, increasingly inward-looking way, its identity diffused. The facilities no longer reflected advances in winemaking or how visitors engaged with it, prompting a dramatic reimagining. For Aidlin Darling Design, the San Francisco–based practice known for finely tuned, site-driven work rather than large corporate commissions, it was an unexpected but compelling opportunity. ‘This is a project that’s way too important – we have to do it,’ recalls founding partner David Darling.

The intervention, says brand marketing director Peggy Hemphill, preserves the estate’s legacy while bringing production to a state-of-the-art level and rethinking the visitor experience – 'blurring the boundaries between architecture and the land’ to reconnect guests with the vineyard and the Mayacamas Mountains beyond. At its core is a renewed emphasis on place: opening the estate to its surroundings and integrating production with hospitality.

The reimagined campus – spanning 216,000 sq ft – pairs restraint with clarity. Decades of accretions have been stripped back and replaced with new layers that sharpen May’s original vision. The arch and tower are restored and repurposed, while a new south wing gathers indoor and outdoor hospitality functions beneath a dynamic, canopy-like roof that stitches together tasting rooms, terraces, retail and a courtyard. An adjacent wood-clad culinary wing and veranda further expand the estate’s public-facing role. Designed for Napa’s climate, many of the open-air spaces can be enclosed with sliding or pivoting glass. On the production side, upgraded fermentation and barrel cellars are on display, bringing the winemaking process into view.

A defining gesture is the inverted gable roof – a multipurpose form that collects water, echoes the Mayacamas Mountains, and establishes a clear dialogue with the historic structures. The project is also grounded in its materiality: concrete walls have an intentionally earthen character, while salvaged wood – oak tank staves marked by peg holes and wine stains, along with heavy timber beams – carries the imprint of the winery’s past into its present. ‘If architecture can have terroir, we wanted it to have a sense of terroir,’ says Darling, framing the project’s link between land, history and human craft.

Sustainability, particularly water stewardship, is central. ‘The future of winemaking is dependent on water – how we use it, how we conserve it, and how we clean and reuse it,’ Darling notes. That thinking informs everything from advanced wastewater treatment to an architectural language that makes cycles of collection and renewal legible. It extends to the buildings themselves: ‘To the greatest extent possible, we wanted to reuse the existing materials and structures,’ he adds – preserving legacy while embedding more responsible practices.

Led by Roderick Wyllie of Surfacedesign, Inc., the landscape design was developed in close collaboration with Aidlin Darling, creating a range of integrated indoor-outdoor environments that offer both expansive and intimate experiences. ‘People can enjoy being outside and feel that connection to the land and the vineyards,’ he says. Native plantings – oak, grasses, manzanitas, yarrow – combine with sculpted topography and locally sourced stone to root the experience in Northern California.

That same emphasis on stewardship carries into the landscape, where water also plays a central role. A bioswale captures runoff for reuse, while an aqueduct-like feature—fed by roof water and composed of quarry spoils and reclaimed slab material—runs east–west, alluding to the connection between the Mayacamas and the Napa River. This focus on natural systems extends to the ground plane, where the former event lawn has been reshaped into a sequence of naturalistic garden rooms, with pathways that draw visitors toward the vineyard itself.

For Mondavi, the transformation is less a reinvention than a realignment – bringing the winery back into closer register with the land, and with the cultural ambition that first defined it.

If it was up to Sabine Marcelis, cellphones would be checked at the door at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The Dutch artist and designer known for her geometric forms attended the festival for the first time last year with her partner and their six month old child. This year, she's back with Maze a new temporary installation on the grounds.

Maze is an inflatable sculpture crafted from PVC in a gradient of red, orange and yellow that is at home in the desert. While its shape and color are inspired by the contours of the surrounding Coachella Valley and high desert region that Marcelis spent time in as a teenager, she is quick to clarify it is not a direct translation.

'I wanted to bring the movement of the mountain ranges and create a setting that felt very isolated from its surroundings as you are very walled off once inside. I wanted to create the feeling of being surrounded the same way the Coachella Valley is by the mountain ranges,' she says.

The installation, commissioned by Public Art Company who handles all of the visual art at Coachella, has a purpose beyond its aesthetics. 'Having gone to Coachella myself, I understood how important it is to be able to find that shade at the festival. I however did not want to create a canopy-style work,' says Marcelis. Instead, the walls of Maze provide shade during the day, creating growing pockets for relaxing as the sun moves. Sculptural benches in matching sunset hues line the exterior and pepper the curves of the maze, providing seating. When the sun goes down, pulsing strips of light inside the inflatable walls are illuminated, creating what Marcelis hopes is an 'all encompassing experience.'

From ideation to installation, Maze took one year to complete. The process began with research during Marcelis’ initial visit to the festival grounds last year. She worked on sketches from April until July before going into production, finishing at the end of 2025. The production and final install was done by a local team, requiring tremendous trust from Marcelis. 'I’m a bit of a control freak,' says the artist, who is used to working with her usual production and installation teams at home in Rotterdam. Less than 24-hours before the festival doors opened, she saw the piece installed for the first time. As daylight moved into golden hour, she finalised the light programming.

Marcelis describes Maze as a 'complementary experience' to the music that will surround it. Festival goers can use it as a place of refuge, whether to escape the sun or easily find friends when cell reception is lost. She believes the best way to experience the work is to allow oneself to pause and appreciate the light and shadow the work creates and enhances.

While Marcelis thinks Maze is best experienced as a moment between experiencing music, when asked which artists from the 2026 lineup she’d pair with the work, she was quick to suggest Dijon, The XX, Röyksopp and Solomun. Attendees who don’t want to miss a moment of music can view the festival’s two main stages from select spots within Maze.

Marcelis knows inevitably, many festival goers will see the work first for its content creation opportunity, but she wishes they wouldn’t. 'It’s not intended as an Instagram moment,' she says, 'I want festival attendees to feel enveloped by the installation and to really feel a moment of calm and wonder between the moments where they are feeling the music. I want people laying on the grass and draped over the seats.'

To honour the artist's intention, consider Maze an exercise in making memories over creating content.

From the suburban street in Fairfax, in California’s western Marin County, only a pop of colour in the form of a row of bright yellow clerestory windows hints at the creative world behind the wooden fence. They announce the arrival of a brand new garden studio, created in the backyard of a historic property by Northern Californian design and architecture firm ONO.

Founded in 2020 by architects Tyler Noblin and Max Obata, who met while working at Snøhetta, ONO aims to create ‘thoughtful yet provocative workplaces’ and ‘iconic yet liveable residences’. The team works from a San Francisco studio full of plants, drawings and music, and were perfectly attuned to the challenges of designing a creative yet practical space.

Tour this characterful garden studio in California

ONO’s Two-Fold garden studio was commissioned by the owners of a 1912 home in Fairfax, a general contractor and a ceramic artist and Pilates teacher. The brief asked for a multifunctional garden pavilion that felt equally pragmatic and unusual, befitting of the surrounding undulating hills and greenery. ONO’s core goals were to ‘design a structure that extended all the way to the property line without feeling imposing while maintaining a strong connection to the landscape and creating a natural, airy interior’.

Created with a keen awareness of the historic home at the front of the property, the new building features a natural cedar shingle façade that echoes the original home. Its modified L-shaped form folds around cherished existing trees to frame an intimate courtyard, while the interior creates two distinct spaces: an artist’s studio opening onto the courtyard; and a Pilates studio accessed through a large pivoting screen door.

‘The site is an irregularly shaped corner lot with a significant slope, many stone retaining walls, and an existing main house with a distinct character that needed to be respected,’ explains Obata. ‘These constraints pushed us toward something we wouldn’t have found on a more straightforward site. We set the building quite close to the front street to create a protected courtyard between it, a significant retaining wall, and the main house.’

Drawing inspiration from Kyoto’s Ryoanji Rock Garden, ONO treated the structure as a viewing pavilion that can be completely opened to the surrounding landscape. ‘The courtyard idea led us to think carefully about how someone actually looks at a garden,’ says Obata.

‘We had explored the Ryoanji rock garden in prior research, and one of its core ideas stayed with us: that lifting a viewer even slightly above the ground plane changes their relationship to the landscape. You become a beholder rather than a participant. We applied that directly here. The studio floor is raised just enough above the courtyard that when you're working or moving through a pilates session, you're looking down onto the garden.’

The studio’s roof extends to shade the low wooden deck, effectively creating a third space within the small footprint. Sliding doors connect the courtyard garden and studio, which is oriented to catch the evening sun. Meanwhile, the Pilates studio is illuminated in the morning and faces the historic house.

At the back of the structure, the yellow clerestory windows funnel light into the studio, creating sightlines of the surrounding tree canopies while preserving privacy. ‘They’re a favourite of ours because of what they reveal about how the building was made. Our builder was also our client, and he brought a level of care that you don’t often get in this type of project.

‘With the clerestory windows, you can trace a continuous line from each structural bay down through the window mullions and into the wall below, following the load path through the building. It’s quiet but precise. And in summer, with the large sliding doors thrown open, the afternoon light comes in late and high, and our client can work on her ceramics well into the evening, while enjoying privacy from the street.’

As for the bright, sunny yellow colour of the window frames, it reflects the art being created inside. ‘Our client works with bold colour in her ceramics, so we knew the palette had to be able to hold its own,’ explains Obata.

‘We kept the material language simple: natural cedar, zinc countertops, blue-stained millwork. Within that, the yellow windows found their place immediately. They work against the warm reddish brown of fresh cedar, and they will work even better as the cedar ages to silver grey,’ he continues. ‘There's also something about them facing the street. The yellow is a signal to anyone passing by: we want our privacy, but we're friendly neighbours!’

ono.co

almconstruction.com

annalisachasan.com

A reimagined modernist home, Hilltop Residence flaunts its low, linear volumes, designed to take in the expansive horizon. Set within Los Altos Hills, the house, which has been brought into the 21st century by Michael Hennessey Architecture, offers long views and the warmth and spaciousness of its midcentury peers; at the same time, it has been restored and refined to tackle its current owners' contemporary lifestyle.

Tour Hilltop Residence by Michael Hennessey Architecture

The project is located on a gentle slope and was originally built in 1959. Spanning a single level, in tune with its genre's typical house design, Hilltop Residence is now the main base of a family of four.

A dramatic cantilevered steel-and-wood carport marks the entrance to the home, which was reconfigured to work with the rejigged internal layout. Soft, brown cedar soffits and framed views of nature from the large windows maintain a warm, nature-informed environment throughout. Meanwhile, black steel detailing provides bold accents.

The architects reimagined the interior completely, focusing on opening up the smaller, partitioned spaces into generous rooms, improving both lighting throughout and the internal flow. For example, now the kitchen, dining, and living spaces have been merged into a single sequence.

More timber throughout the construction includes Shou Sugi Ban exterior cladding, which creates a textural, craft-rich envelope (Hennessey worked closely with general contractor William Fisher's Hike Space for the desired result); and light oak surfaces inside, in storage and built in furniture.

The aim was for the design to emphasise 'clarity, proportion, and connection to the landscape', the architects explain. 'Carefully placed windows frame distant views from the living spaces and bedrooms, while new decks extend the home’s footprint outward. Sustainable upgrades, including photovoltaic panels, high-performance glazing, and permeable paving, ensure that the renovation strikes a balance between beauty and performance.'

Blending light, organic materials and a thoughtful approach to the structure's historical design, with Hilltop Residence, Michael Hennessey and his team produced a home that feels at once contemporary and timeless – and ready to take on the demands of family life.

hennesseyarchitect.com

Welcome to the debut of the long-awaited Rivian R2. The electric SUV specialist has announced the final specifications and production timings for its second core model, following on from the R1 SUV and pick-up launched back in 2021. The Rivian R2 was unveiled in 2024, alongside an even smaller and sportier R3 (yet to make it to production).

The key takeaway is that the R2 is smaller yet no less stuffed with function, clever packaging and Rivian’s signature looks. In the past 18 months, Rivian has doubled down on its design offering, with everything from the one-off Rivian R1S Quad Miami Edition to the limited series California Dune Edition R1 demonstrating that off-book colours, materials and trim are all very much part of the company’s experience from now onwards.

The R2 is a mid-size SUV (equating to a large SUV in European parlance). It sits on a new dedicated platform and has been shaped, styled and specified to reduce the overall price without diluting the Rivian experience. A top-line R1S can run to around $120,000, whereas the launch model R2 Performance retails at less than half that. The R2 Standard, when it arrives next year, will start at $45,000.

It’s certainly more than half the car. To the unfamiliar, the design language and proportions appear near identical, although the R2 is lower, shorter and lighter than the original R1S. The company’s founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe, says that the new model ‘embodies so many of our learnings that we have accumulated’.

Range and performance are competitive, with the base model offering over 275 miles of range and the premium performance model should deliver up to 330miles, according to the company. That same model has 656hp and a 3.6 second sprint time, as well as unbeatable highway acceleration (an important metric in the American market, where the necessity of joining multiple lanes of fast-flowing, unyielding traffic requires punchy mid-range acceleration).

The R2 Performance Launch Package also comes with access to Tesla’s Supercharging network, as well as conventional charge ports, and has semi-active suspension. Inside, the full gamut of Rivian’s renewed emphasis on materials and function are on display.

This includes birch-wood trim accents, four heated seats, a 975W nine-speaker audio system, opening tailgate glass and other neat touches, like the flashlight contained in the driver’s door and integrated tow hooks.

The company’s much-praised HMI showcases the various drive modes (All-Purpose, Conserve, Snow, All-Terrain, Rally, Soft Sand, Sport and Launch), while onboard tech also includes a vehicle lifetime subscription to the Autonomy+ system. This Level 2+ hands-free driving experience is so far tuned to North America (and covers 3.5 million miles of roads across the US and Canada, according to Rivian).

Autonomy+ makes use of the R2’s ‘multi-model perception stack’, no less than 11 HDR cameras and five radar sensors. The system will continue to evolve through OTA updates; future improvements include the arrival of Rivian’s dedicated AI assistant.

Twin digital displays, including a central touchscreen, take charge of the vast majority of control systems, although the R2 also includes a new steering wheel with embedded haptic dials, called Halo Wheels. These bring context-aware controls to the R2 and are meant to bring a more analogue feel to the interface.

The R2 could just be the first Rivian model to make it over the Atlantic and tackle the European market, although there’s no official word on when and whether that’ll happen just yet. Still a sizeable machine by European standards, it nevertheless brings a fresh approach to design and technology that should mitigate the old school image of the SUV.

Rivian R2 Performance with Launch Package, from $57,990, Rivian.com, @RivianOfficial

This newly listed property in Thousand Oaks brings together two of the most influential figures in midcentury modern design: developer Joseph Eichler (1900-1974) and architect A Quincy Jones (1913-1979). Eichler is widely credited with bringing modernist architecture to middle-class America, commissioning forward-thinking architects to design homes that prioritised openness, light and a closer relationship with nature (check out another Eichler home, in Concord, California, which we explored last year). Among his most frequent collaborators was Jones, whose work helped shape the architectural language of post-war California through residential communities that balanced modernist principles with liveable, family-oriented layouts.

This home is a compelling example of that collaboration in practice. Built in 1964, it reflects the defining principles of Eichler’s architecture: post-and-beam construction, open-plan living areas, floor-to-ceiling glazing and a deliberate blurring of boundaries between interior and exterior.

The property sits within the Eichler-304 subdivision – also known as Lynn Estates or Conejo Village – a neighbourhood of approximately 102 homes that represents one of the final tracts of single-family Eichler houses ever built. While the community has never been formally landmarked, it is widely recognised by historians and preservationists as an important example of midcentury residential planning, offering a remarkably intact snapshot of the architectural optimism that defined California suburbia in the 1960s.

The house has recently undergone a careful reimagining. Originally designed as a five-bedroom model, the property was expanded in the 1960s and further refined by the current owners, who added approximately 800 sq ft. The layout has been reworked around two distinct wings connected by open central living spaces. In total, the home now offers 2,460 sq ft of living space, with four bedrooms and three bathrooms, set on a generous 13,068 sq ft lot – one of the largest in the development.

Crucially, the renovation has retained many of the architectural elements that define Eichler homes. The ceilings were hand-sanded to reveal the warm tones of the original redwood tongue-and-groove, a detail that underscores the craftsmanship of the period. Radiant heating embedded in the slab foundation – another signature Eichler feature – remains intact, preserving the building’s original construction logic.

Where contemporary updates have been introduced, they have been handled with restraint. Solid oak interior doors incorporate rain-glass detailing, while Venetian plaster adds texture to the fireplace and sections of the hallway. Handmade Porcelanosa Bottega tiles from Spain ground the interiors with a tactile finish. Sculptural lighting fixtures – many drawing inspiration from midcentury brutalist forms – were selected by the seller’s partner, a former associate designer to Kelly Wearstler (who guest edited Wallpaper* magazine in October 2022).

The kitchen acts as the social and visual centre of the home. Custom cabinetry is paired with Taj Mahal leathered quartz slabs, while a built-in espresso station and wine bar adds a luxurious touch.

Outdoors, the property extends the Eichler philosophy of indoor-outdoor living. A redwood pergola paired with Brazilian ipe-wood decking creates a shaded area, while the saltwater pool and spa have been fully renovated using Italian Stella Bianca marble. A fire pit and mature landscaping frame hillside views, and the garden includes more than 40 varieties of roses and fruit trees.

Through the combined vision of Eichler and Jones, homes like this redefined suburban architecture. This latest reworking respects that legacy while gently elevating it – proof that, when handled with care, midcentury modernism can feel as relevant today as it did six decades ago.

The Thousand Oaks property is listed for $2,395,000, ninakurtz.com

This is the latest instalment of The Inside Story, Wallpaper’s series spotlighting intriguing, innovative and industry-leading interior design.

A mobile home in Malibu might not sound like much at first – but this is no ordinary trailer. Firstly, it’s set within Malibu Beach Trailer Park – once dubbed ‘America’s most glamorous trailer park’ by The New York Times. A trailer park in structure only, the enclave operates instead as an ultra-prime stretch of oceanfront real estate, favoured by wealthy homeowners and celebrities.

Secondly, the 1960s beach unit has undergone an extensive and impressive renovation by Alana Marie Interiors. The space was, by all accounts, ripe for reinvention. Cramped, dated and awkwardly configured, it inspired one former owner to admit that ‘anything would have been an improvement’. Today, that modest shell has been transformed into a multigenerational retreat that feels, says Alana Marie, ‘sophisticated, with a level of oceanfront comfort that would endure through generations.’

Marie looked outward for her cues. Walks along the shoreline contemplating the striations and hues of local stones inspired a palette that feels grounded and beachy, yet free of cliché or nostalgia.

The inspiration was also literal: stone anchors the scheme. Reclaimed bluestone tiles – varied in grain, softly tumbled at the edges and deeply pitted – run through the living room and hallway, their forgiving surface ideal for sandy feet while also offering visual counterpoint to solid oak ceilings above. In the primary bathroom, hand-chipped marble mosaics from Waterworks conjure a moody, spa-like intimacy, while a sculptural slab of marble elevates the outdoor shower. Timber, from the wire-brushed Thermo Radiata cladding to the oak overhead, introduces warmth and depth, while Roman Clay walls and robust, textural fabrics help create a layered, tactile interior.

The original 1,100 sq ft layout felt fragmented: a central kitchen, sealed-off bedrooms and a rear deck obstructed by a solarium and stairs. Marie reworked the plan to enhance storage, increase sleeping capacity and strengthen the connection between indoors and out. Along the ocean-facing wall, two expansive glass panels now pocket away entirely, dissolving the boundary between kitchen, living space and deck. Height restrictions ruled out a second storey, but strategic lofting provides additional sleeping quarters and storage.

Outside, the back deck extends the home’s ‘built-in’ feel, featuring a sunken lounge oriented squarely toward the horizon. Skylights and generous glazing draw in the soft Californian light, while the loft’s skylight offers a 360-degree panorama of rooftops and rolling surf.

The owners describe the evolution as a journey from ‘an eyesore into a luxury smart home’. Yet beyond its technological upgrades, the renovation succeeds in something less tangible: honouring the storied, bohemian legacy of Paradise Cove.

Recreate the mood...

Genesis' arrival in California is no surprise. The West Coast is still one of the global hearts of car culture, as evinced by the state’s impressive haul of major car design studios. As well as GM’s Advanced Design Center in Pasadena, BMW DesignWorks, and Toyota’s long-standing outpost in Newport Beach, CALTY Design Research, there are also major studios belonging to Honda, Nissan, Audi, and more.

Tour Genesis Design California in El Segundo

Last autumn, the South Korean maker joined the Golden State roster with the opening of Genesis Design California in El Segundo. What started out as an 80,000 sq ft industrial warehouse has been turned into a state-of-the-art design centre, complete with offices, a model shop, car storage and event space.

Designed by Californian firm Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects (EYRC), the new space combines a low energy footprint with all the space, daylight and flexibility that a major studio needs.

One of the key activities at Genesis Design California is presentation; this is where design studies, concepts and new production variations are shown to stakeholders within the company and beyond. On site are no fewer than five turntables for 360-degree evaluation – these include outdoor locations for crucial scrutiny in the harsh Californian sun.

Genesis’ current ethos is ‘New Thinking, New Possibilities’, and the brand – which is part of the Hyundai Motor Group – is currently undergoing a rethink, with a clutch of new concepts, including the X Skorpio Concept, and the upcoming Magma performance sub-brand, designed to turn cars like the GV60 into cult high-performance EVs.

Design is very much a global, ongoing enterprise in the auto industry, with a network of studios allowing 24-hour operation. That’s certainly the case with Genesis. The 45 team members who now work in El Segundo join existing studios in Seoul and Frankfurt, spanning the globe with a seamless handover between time zones.

According to Luc Donckerwolke, Genesis’ chief creative officer, ‘design is brand and brand is design. Genesis Design California is the embodiment of this,’ he continues. ‘It embraces our distinctly Korean identity, creating a space that inspires creativity. I cannot wait to see that inspiration come to life in the team’s work.’

In addition to the active workspaces required for translating 3D models into physical ones, whether through 3D-printing, clay-modelling or a combination of the two, the new space includes a research library, private retreat spaces and outdoor gardens that fuse traditional Korean garden design and Californian planting. The brand’s heritage is also reflected in a traditional tea platform in the library space.

EYRC Architects was set up in 1979 and has offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The 30-strong team has received over 200 awards, including 12 national awards from the American Institute of Architects.

For Genesis, the studio has fused its commercial experience with its portfolio of elegant private houses and hotels, creating a friendly domestic scale and ambience with undeniable industrial overtones.

EYRC.com

Genesis.com

Ever wondered what's at the heart of desert modernism? Perhaps, Frank Lloyd Wright defined it best:

'A desert building should be nobly simple in outline as the region itself is sculptured [...], the manmade building heightening the beauty of the desert and the desert more beautiful because of the building,' the modernist architecture master said in the May 1940 issue of Arizona Highways magazine.

Wright’s trenchant yet florid observations suggest the powerful urgency of desert architecture – combining shelter and openness, materials that stem from their land and modern forms, a highly tailored architecture rubbing shoulders with the raw power of nature.

What is desert modernism?

Any building for harsh, extreme environments must address harnessing climatic conditions in the service of human comfort. Earthen-based materials and indigenous building traditions come into play, revealing time-honoured ingenuity developed over millennia. Then, in the twentieth century, unadorned forms shaped by the broader sweep of modernism were responses to new tools and technical innovations that met the cultural moment then, and continue to do so today - impacting design in arid environments too.

Key characteristics of desert modernism

Desert modernism isn’t a monolith (and naturally, examples abound in many other countries), and yet hallmarks emerged from the architecture community's earliest experiments in the 1920s through the cities and suburbs that bloomed throughout the American Southwest in the mid-late 1940s through the 1960s. Designers and developers looked to readily available, industrially produced building components as well as earthen elements – sometimes culled from the site itself – that, when combined with skilful architectural moves, established templates for seamless indoor/outdoor living.

Roofs with generous eaves intended to provide shade were generally flat or gently sloped, given the general absence of rain. Hardscaping and plant choices reflected the surrounding native vegetation. Despite the advent of air conditioning, the most thoughtful iterations of this genre would continue to sensitively manage the realities of desert climates, such as harsh west-facing exposures, through passive measures in shading and ventilation - for example, using breeze-blocks.

Desert modernism in the US: a brief history

Up until the Second World War, the American Southwest’s deeply hybridised cultural and social milieu was largely evident in its formal and vernacular architecture. The romanticised Spanish Colonial Revival style borrowed references from Spain and neighbouring Mexico, with localised architectural dialects emerging throughout the border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Pueblo Revival architecture and adobe structures mimicked Native American architectural heritage, particularly in New Mexico. From today’s perspective, however, such places can carry an allure of authenticity that in some cases might be more rooted in complicated myth than historical fact.

Certain zero-humidity hamlets sparsely populated by non-natives, notably Palm Springs, attracted those seeking relief from respiratory ailments. Nellie Coffman’s The Desert Inn in Palm Springs eventually grew from a tent-like sanitarium opened in 1909 to a 35-acre, gracious, full-service getaway popular with the Southern California glitterati. Resorts such as the Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr.-designed Oasis Hotel and El Mirador Hotel followed. What had been a nascent wellness industry that valued seclusion and ample space planted the seeds of the town’s hospitality and leisure boom where modernism would thrive.

Early residential examples and proponents

Rudolph Schindler’s Popenoe Cabin, built in 1922 at the eastern edge of the Coachella Valley in Indio, California, is generally regarded as the first modern effort in the Southern California region that’s become most closely associated with the movement. The modest wood frame and concrete structure, which regretfully has been demolished, shares a generally overlapping timeframe and characteristics with the architect’s own radical home and studio in West Hollywood.

The desert became a muse to leading practitioners of the early and mid-twentieth century who ventured westward. Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruce Goff, Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, and John Lautner were emigres or Midwestern transplants who embraced experimentation in uninterrupted spatial expanse. In 1937, Grace Lewis Miller commissioned Neutra for a winter home and studio to support her Mensendieck System of Functional Exercises teaching practice. The compact structure sat lightly on the land, complete with a reflecting pool that touched what was then an unsullied Sonoran Desert vista.

Nearly a decade later, the more ambitious Edgar J. Kaufmann House by Neutra rose from its large, sandy lot. Its interplay of flat roofs, a second-level open 'gloriette,' floor-to-ceiling plate glass, sandstone, crimped sheet-metal fascia, and seductive poolside outdoor lounge was built for the Pittsburgh department store magnate who had famously commissioned Fallingwater from Wright. Julius Shulman’s 1947 photograph and Slim Aarons’ evocative 'Poolside Gossip' image taken in 1970 helped broadcast the home and modern desert lifestyle to the world. This language proved adaptable to being both practical and deluxe.

Architects John Porter Clark and Le Corbusier disciple Albert Frey committed themselves to an intensive consideration of how to design and build for the desert when, in 1935, they established their business partnership that for nearly two decades shaped the Palm Springs area.

Prolific practitioners such as E. Stewart Williams, William E. Cody, Donald Wexler, William Krisel, and Dan Palmer continued to experiment with low-slung residences –often with open plans and always with a strong indoor-outdoor connection - at various price points – in the Coachella Valley, using a palette of concrete, steel, and glass.

Aspirational prototypes evolved into replicable models at a larger scale. The 1950s saw the growth of suburban tract developments in settings with inexpensive land that promised the winter-chill-free good life, complete with the latest in technological creature comforts, such as air-conditioning. An ethos that advanced modernism’s democratic leanings was embedded in the residential and commercial work of architects such as Al Beadle and Ralph Haver in Phoenix, Arizona, and throughout the built environment of that ultimate human playground: Las Vegas.

Planned neighbourhoods dotted with post-and-beam dwellings, including Marlen Grove in Phoenix (1952), Paradise Palms in Las Vegas (1960), and the Alexander Construction Co.’s multiple communities in the Coachella Valley, offered accessible templates of conventional American family life rather than a taste of the architectural avant-garde (more, relatively luxurious developments were centred around golfing and cocktail-abetted socialising). Details such as butterfly roofs and folded plates conveyed post-war optimism, and elements, including concrete brise soleil or breeze blocks, added pattern, depth, and playfulness.

The case of the desert utopias

Seekers in search of spiritual enlightenment and higher purpose - architects included, either directly for their own pursuits or in the service of clients - have also found themselves in the great arid vastness. Frank Lloyd Wright passed on the opportunity to design the Institute of Mentalphysics for Rev. Edwin John Dingle, known as Ding Le Mei, on a sprawling site near Joshua Tree Park acquired in 1941. Instead, his son, the aforementioned Lloyd Wright, accepted the task of creating multiple buildings on the still-extant (yet not completed as originally envisioned) colony, incorporating rocks and materials from the land itself and principles of sacred geometry to support the organisation’s mission.

'Organic architecture is distinguished from the facade-making which passes for modern architecture today, as you can see in our home, Taliesin West,' Frank Lloyd Wright wrote in 1953 about the learn-by-doing, apprentice-powered campus he began in 1937 that brought his Taliesin Fellowship from Wisconsin to Scottsdale, Arizona. Wright and team then kept busy in the desert. The concrete block 1950 David and Gladys Wright House, built for his son and daughter-in-law, featured a spiralling ramp that was a subtle preview of the Guggenheim Museum, and the dramatic ASU Gammage auditorium debuted in 1964.

Taliesin West lured an ambitious Italian architect, Paolo Soleri, who in 1970 created his Arcosanti 'arcology' laboratory (a portmanteau for 'architecture' and 'ecology') in Mayer, Arizona. The otherworldly compound remains a preferred off-duty working vacation for architects who participate in the sustainable community’s hands-on workshops (it should be said that Soleri’s daughter accused him of sexual abuse).

Desert modernism's commercial appeal

Modernist aesthetics and twentieth-century capitalism were compatible endeavours, with overlapping interests of efficiency and scale. Automobile-centric retail and commercial strips like Tucson’s Sunshine Mile emerged with ample parking and attention-grabbing neon signage to boot.

Despite the general inclination towards minimal ornamentation, designers distinguished work in inventive ways. Rudi Baumfeld of Victor Gruen and Associates seized the opportunity for expressive flourishes with the swooping roof line that’s a nod to Le Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamp, France, at the blue mosaic tile-clad 1959 City National Bank (now a Bank of America branch) on South Palm Canyon Drive.

The future of desert modernism

Architects and builders have amassed enough information at this point in history to design boldly, beautifully, and carefully. Even if desert denizens are used to scorching temperatures and parched surfaces, rising global temperatures, increasingly fragile ecosystems, and threatened plant and animal species require a heightened sensitivity to environmental impacts and effective heat mitigation moves.

Architects, including Cade Hayes and Jesús Edmundo Robles, Jr. of D U S T, Lake Flato, Jorge Gracia, Benjamin Hall, Marmol Radziner, Sean Lockyer, and Lance O’Donnell - among several others - demonstrate how continually evolving contemporary design sensibilities that value context while embracing both proven ancient and innovative construction methods can yield transcendently beautiful outcomes.

11 key examples of desert modernism

Taliesin West

Who: Frank Lloyd Wright (1937-)

Where: Scottsdale, Arizona

Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home, workshop, and architecture school has been the site of astounding creativity (and scandal-making drama) since he broke ground and the Fellowship began its work in 1937.

The Institute of Mentalphysics/Joshua Tree Retreat Center

Who: Lloyd Wright (1940s)

Where: Yucca Valley, California

Perhaps no place other than the Institute of Mentalphysics (or the Joshua Tree Retreat Center) better exemplifies California’s history of movements tied to alternative spirituality, what we now call health and wellness, self-reinvention, and the architecture that supported it. The 1940s campus, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is the largest concentration of buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr., AKA Lloyd Wright, and features structures by other architects such as Harold Zook.

Lautner Compound

Who: John Lautner (1947)

Where: Desert Hot Springs, California

John Lautner’s complex composed of four contiguous yet internally differentiated units is now available for overnight stays and special events. Lautner’s work eventually became more ambitious with clients who had grander visions and bigger bank accounts. Look no further than the concrete and glass wizardly at the Arthur Elrod House, built in 1968 for Palm Springs’ most famous interior decorator and featured in the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, and the Bob and Dolores Hope House from the late 1970s.

Racquet Club Estates

Who: Palmer & Krisel, Donald Wexler et al. for the Alexander Construction Co. (1960s)

Where: Palm Springs, California

Planned communities like Racquet Club Estates developed by the Alexander Construction Co. represented midcentury aspirations of modern American lifestyles and middle-class leisure.

Frey House II

Who: Albert Frey (1964)

Where: Palm Springs, California

A few decades into his career, Swiss-born Albert Frey confidently used his signature gestures and materials to fashion a home nestled among the boulders and rock outcroppings on a perch above Palm Springs.

Arcosanti

Who: Paolo Soleri (1970-)

Where: Mayer, Arizona

Experimental and experiential living and learning continue at Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti.

Jacobson House (1975-77)

Who: Judith Chafee

Where: Tucson, Arizona

Judith Chafee returned to her native Tucson after graduating as the sole woman in her Yale School of Architecture class in 1960, and working in the studios of Paul Rudolph, Edward Larabee Barnes, and Eero Saarinen. Far from her profession’s geographic power and prestige base in the Northeast, she synthesised local precedents with her formal training steeped in post-war theory and practice. The result? Singular interpretations of Southwestern residential modernism over the course of Chafee’s under-heralded career.

La Luz del Oeste

Who: Antoine Predock (1967)

Where: Albuquerque, New Mexico

Despite or perhaps because of Antoine Predock’s inclination to engage with polemics related to his region, the Albuquerque-based architect literally designed the 1994 Disney version of a Santa Fe-inspired hotel for the Paris park. The multifamily La Luz del Oeste community reiterates how and why the desert is conducive to questions of context-appropriateness and stylistic idiosyncrasies that resist easy categorisation.

Amangiri

Who: Marwan Al-Sayed/Masastudio, Wendell Burnette and Rick Joy (2009)

Where: Canyon Point, Utah

Desert brutalism arises like an ancient monument from red earth, and here, also, as a coveted ultra-luxury resort in remote southern Utah.

Tucson Mountain Retreat

Who: D U S T Architects (2012)

Where: Tucson, AZ

Tucson-based D U S T Architects homes are meditation and poetry in built form, often constructed out of rammed earth and using hand-built techniques that sit in harmony with sites in Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas.

Marfa Ranch

Who: Lake Flato (2021)

Where: Marfa, Texas

Lake Flato deftly integrates the colour and material palette of the surrounding Chihuahuan Desert into this house using rammed earth situated on the vast West Texas prairie.

IT House

Who: Taalman Architecture (2008)

Where: Joshua Tree, California

A prototype of off-grid living, IT House was designed by Taalman Architecture studio in the early 2000s to be modular and prefabricated, addressing issues around sustainability and environmental impact.

Secluded along the eastern slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains and surrounded by old-growth woodlands in a rolling valley of greens and gold, Portola Valley, California is a community nothing less than idyllic. It’s also the setting for a thoughtfully conceived architectural gesture of ultimate liberation.

When Megumi Aihara and Dan Spiegel, cofounders of award-winning San Francisco-based cross-disciplinary design firm Spiegel Aihara Workshop (SAW), were approached by their friends and clients Aruna and Sanjiv Gambhir to design a new home, they knew it would be one of their most meaningful and ambitious collaborations.

Following the loss of their teenage son, Milan, to cancer in 2015, the Gambhirs were intent on having a space for reflection and a new beginning. 'It was an interesting exercise in what it means to honor a memory and build upon what he contributed to their lives,' Spiegel explains. 'But also, how to just manage their own lives going forward.'

The site they found was a breathtaking three-acre plot of land on a bluff with views stretching all the way to San Francisco on a clear day. And what they envisioned—a retreat consisting of a 7,800 sq ft, four-bedroom, three-bathroom main house and 1,200 sq ft two-bedroom guest cottage integrated within the sloping site—would be, literally, transcendental.

But during the years-long permitting and approval processes, Sanjiv – a pioneer in molecular imaging and a professor in cancer research at the nearby Stanford School of Medicine – also passed away from cancer. Aruna, however, decided to press on with the project. 'She wanted to see the project through for him,' shares Spiegel. 'He was passionate about design and Aruna now wanted to honour both Sanjiv and her son.'

Seeing the project as a continuation of her family’s story, Aruna suggested naming it Moksha – a Buddhist concept that refers to a release from the unbound cycle of life and death, offering a reflection of the home’s spiritual origin. It was a sentiment echoed from the very beginning. 'Every decision we were making was about a kind of rebirth or renewal,' adds Aihara. 'There was the repurposing of redwood trees that were fell from fires and landslides, and the use of other materials that would change over time.'

Salvaged old-growth redwood used for siding and rainscreens soften the board-formed concrete walls that make up the main dwelling’s ground floor that. The second cantilevered level is also clad in the same reclaimed wood that will silver with time to reveal a lustrous sheen. Inside, custom-milled, salvaged blue-gum eucalyptus flooring adds warmth and durability, while walls of windows allow sunlight to stretch throughout the home from multiple angles all day long.

'The twisting of that cantilever was positioned for the views, but also to provide shade and relief from the sun,' says Spiegel. 'We wanted it to be animated by the amazing lighting conditions across different times of day.'

One of the challenges faced by the architects was how the home’s eventual inhabitants would feel the 'bigness of the world beneath them' while not feeling too exposed. To that end, they created introverted areas that offer a sense of coziness and solitude, like with the pool deck. 'As you swim toward one end you can see the San Francisco skyline on your left and, straight ahead, you’re overlooking the Stanford campus and all the way across the East Bay to Mount Diablo,' Spiegel notes. 'But as you swim toward the other end, you’re deeply enclosed in a sort of private shell.'

Similarly, a nearby breakfast nook offers a quiet spot to enjoy the morning sun before taking a dip. Another such area, visible only from windows in the primary suite and a connected sauna, is a contemplative garden courtyard enclosed by redwood siding reclaimed from the house that previously stood on the site. 'You can look way out over vineyards on the neighbouring hillside,” Aihara says.

It’s in these meditative nooks nestled amongst majestic Valley Oak trees, vines, and native grasses – and the seemingly endless vistas – that SAW’s clients hoped to envisage their future together. But sadly, Aruna never saw the home to completion – she died just a few months before the homes completion, five years after her husband.

The house today represents something else – the potential of creativity and compassion; the home was completed and sold last year, with the proceeds funding endowed professorships for cancer research at both UCLA and Stanford in the name of the Gambhirs' son). 'A young tech entrepreneur who’d been a student at Stanford bought it,' Spiegel says. 'He didn’t know the backstory [at the time] – aside from the charitable purpose of the sale – and loved the design, as well as the fact his money would go to the endowments.'

'In some ways it was one of the most exciting projects we’ve worked on and, in many ways, the most difficult,' he reflects. 'It challenged our thinking about the nature of what we do, why and for whom – and what it means to make something in the world.'

Tour the rest of this spectacular house

American architect John Lautner designed over 200 architecture projects during his career, which began in the 1930s with an apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright. He then started his own firm in Los Angeles in 1938.

Most of John Lautner's work was realised in California, including the development of his famous Googie-style coffee shops in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Garcia House, and perhaps, his most famous home, the Sheats-Goldstein Residence in the hills of Los Angeles. It is also in LA that local firm Conner + Perry Architects was recently tasked to restore and remodel one of the late architect’s masterpieces from the early 1980s, ‘Lautner's Castle’.

Step inside Lautner’s Castle with us

Positioned along the topography of a steep hillside, the home features an array of cylindrical stone turrets along the south face. These are both structural and architectural, illustrating Lautner's philosophy, which emphasises natural materials, blending stone, steel, glass, and wood, and a harmonious relationship with the landscape.

With extensive experience working on Lautner properties, including the Sheats-Goldstein residence, Conner + Perry Architects started on the Lautner's Castle restoration project in 2019. Principals Kristopher Conner and James Perry were entrusted to make modern enhancements that would not disturb the original modernist architecture, while also meeting the needs of a 21st-century family lifestyle.

The home unfolds with a wide curving hallway and a ribbed wooden ceiling that spans the entire upper floor. Just outside the front-facing windows, copper elements on top of the beams replaced the white painted metal that will age more congruently with the house.

In the living area, a dramatic linear LED wood structure of single-ply wood-veneer fins hangs from the ceiling over the dining table, theatrically illuminating the exposed timber ceilings. ‘I conceived of it as a dragon for Lautner's Castle,’ says Conner. ‘The house has a nautical feel. The roof structure, to me, feels like the hull of a ship turned upside down. We actually replaced the entire roof, so when we ripped it off, you could really see the details. This thing was built like a ship with these diagonal boards, creating a unitised structure.’

The team also brought in chrome eyeball lights to enhance a sense of direction in the entryway. These cast a light on the Douglas fir wood panels, which were completely stripped and refinished in the majority of the house.

In the living room, a custom cream sofa designed by the architects morphs from a daybed to a formal sitting area. Its supports were made with glulam Douglas fir (same as the house beams), and the integrated table at its heart is fabricated from solid slabs, taking inspiration from the house, its materials and geometries.

One of the most fascinating architectural features is that each of the cylindrical stone columns hosts a programmatic element. One in the living room contains a functioning wet bar, while the kitchen one is a built-in pantry. These pillars also help frame the city and canyon views that unfold beyond the exterior balcony that runs the length of the property; and you might just spot a herd of deer sauntering around the hillside.

‘What’s interesting about this house,’ says Conner, ‘is that in most of Lautner's houses, where there's a view, the architecture really opens up to the view in a very dramatic way. But here, I think there is much more of an interior focus on the house. The skyline views get framed in these spaces between the stone [cylinders]. The drama is the two terraced balconies. He takes those lessons from Frank Lloyd Wright about compression and expansion, and increasing the drama.’

Expansive windows offer natural light and frame the lush green surroundings. The skilful use of warm woods and stone flooring continues to the exterior (where it was refurbished), further blurring the lines between indoors and outdoors, in the spirit of Lautner’s philosophy and approach.

The kitchen was actually renovated by Conner and Perry’s previous mentor, and a Lautner associate, Duncan Nicholson, around 2013, so this area stayed pretty much true to the original, including the island constructed out of a stone slab with an edged treatment.

There was no hood for the [stove] range, but the architectural duo added discreet slots in the ceiling and a commercial vent fan on the roof. ‘This is telling of our approach to the restoration of the house; everything was, where possible, just a minimal intervention, trying to preserve the architecture as much as [we could],’ says Conner.

On the first-floor interior, among a host of interventions by Conner and Perry, the library transitions into a media room (featuring a hidden state-of-the-art A/V system, a projection screen and integrated audio), a custom-built-in sofa, and shelving that supports the room's functionality. The chevron wood flooring was replaced ‘like for like’ according to Conner.

In the primary suite, the original sunken tatami mats were replaced with a custom platform bed with integrated nightstands, and wall sconces that blend into the vertical-grain wall panelling with Lutron lighting. In addition, an original small office off the hallway was converted into a second walk-in closet featuring a rotating clothes rack.


The bathtub in the primary bathroom with its canyon view was completely revamped, replacing an old fibreglass jacuzzi with a new custom Corian soaking tub, a hardwood tub deck and hardware from Vola, along with a privacy shade.

A water closet, adjacent to the already showstopping stone-cylinder primary shower with its dramatic circular skylight that frames the clouds, was refurbished and a new skylight was added. At the vanity corner, a custom-carved double-bowled vessel sink was installed after it was carved out of a boulder by Stoneland, USA, in the valley. Its rare size meant it took a year to procure.

Throughout the home, the original bathroom tiles were maintained, including in the powder rooms, where skylights were added. Here, lighted fixtures were updated to modern LEDs that are colour-adapting, so you can simulate different types of daylight. A dedicated make-up station was added to the primary bathroom area.

A restored spiral staircase is covered in an updated version of the original Italian red wool carpet and leads down a lower level where three more bedrooms and a bonus guest-game room are. The original second-level bedrooms were lacking in light, so Conner and Perry transformed the old guest bedroom by placing larger windows in the corner looking out onto the surrounding garden and incorporating intricate millwork, such as the built-in headboard with drawers, floating shelves, and a wardrobe.

‘We expanded this window all the way down to the floor, so you could see so much lush greenery, and then the views,’ says Conner. Outside this guest room is a hybrid piece of furniture serving as both a deck and a bench. ‘It's really just about creating that intimate relationship with the garden here.’

A jack-and-jill set of two bedrooms and a bathroom is now joined by the game-guest room. Frosted glass doors bring in more natural light. The original concrete floors were redone with concrete micro-topping product in keeping with the Lautner philosophy of trying to blur inside and outside in a cohesive manner.

On the exterior, Conner and Perry extended the architecture into the landscape, providing little pockets or vignettes to spend more quality time outside, including a dining table and concrete bench, an outdoor kitchen with a barbecue grill. An old storage closet was converted into a cabana bathroom with a nearby outdoor shower.

Working with the pool’s original structural engineering, the noted Lautner collaborator Andrew Nasser, Conner and Perry carved out an expansive deck beneath the pool – an area that was previously inaccessible. This becomes a third level for the home, cantilevering out of the hillside. Here, you will find a wooden infinity deck featuring a stone fire pit, a long built-in concrete bench, and custom lounge chairs by Conner + Perry Architects. ‘All of this used to be a barren dirt hillside,’ adds Conner.

Providing both shelter and dramatic canyon views, the space offers a unique perspective of the underside of Lautner's bold cantilevering structure. ‘We were very careful not to have a guard rail. We added these planters and this little hiking trail that loops back around the property.’

The exterior landscaping outside was previously sparse. It is now lush with a cactus garden at the front and a hillside at the rear. The latter splits off into walkways flanked by a mix of native plants and a pop of Bougainvillaea for colour. ‘We've spent years developing this. Now, there are almost these little microclimates and a fern grove where it's shady,’ says Conner.

In the end, one of the biggest challenges for the architects was navigating the generous landscape element in this project without detracting from the original architecture. As in all of Lautner’s most significant works, a key concern was the relationships between human being and space, space and nature, and that enduring ethos has been well preserved at Lautner's Castle.

conner-perry.com

Nearly two decades ago, Wallpaper* correspondent Paul McCann and photographer Laura Wilson took a tour of the Kappe House in Pacific Palisades, along with another of the architect’s projects, the 1972 home and office of psychotherapist Dr Esther Benton in Brentwood.

Kappe, who died in 2019 at the age of 92, co-founded the Southern California Institute of Architecture (better known as SCI-Arc) with the architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis.

A pioneering architectural educator as well as a practising architect, many of his houses have featured in films and TV shows over the decades, helping shape the public perception of Californian modernism (the Benton house featured in Californication, One Hour Photo, Cruel Intentions, among others).

Kappe’s wife, Shelly, died in early 2025 at the age of 96. A prominent architectural historian and academic, Shelly Kappe used her role as a writer and curator to showcase some of the key players in modern LA’s architectural history.

Of all the architect's projects – including the Triesch Residence near Berlin – Kappe's own residence is perhaps his most famous. Designated a Cultural Historical Monument all the way back in 1996, the LA Times once called it ‘The Greatest house in Southern California’, and it's easy to see why the architectural legacy of this particular project has been so enduring.

Set on a sloping site in Rustic Canyon, the Kappe House is arranged over no less than seven levels and covers some 4,157 square feet. Kappe’s spatial genius is in evidence from the get go, with steps leading up from the road, threading past mature trees to the front door, set beneath a cantilevered canopy – which doubles up as a balcony for the floor above.

Formed from vertical concrete supports criss-crossed with vast redwood beams, the house is a true interlocking puzzle. The entrance level houses Kappe's glass-walled office, reached by a bridge above the carport.

From here, stairs lead up another level to the centrepiece, a double-height living room flanked by a raised den on one side and the kitchen on the other, each overlooking the sunken living space in the middle, furnished with distinctive blue seating in the house’s heyday.

A multiplicity of views up, down and across are available from this one space, with low level voids, vast frameless glazed and high-level clerestory windows maximising the interplay between the beams and the walls.

Rich detailing abounds, from the built-in kitchen with its timber worktops, exposed concrete walls and terracotta flooring, and the primary bedroom, with its sunken fireplace, desk and recliner, flanked by views out to the canyon vegetation beyond. Natural planting is offset by rock gardens, as well as a lap pool with spa, sauna and cabana.

The house has five bathrooms and another four bedrooms, with walkways that take a vertiginous path across the sloping site as well as huge windows that are filled with a view of abundant greenery.

The main suite occupies the house’s northeast wing, with a further collection of three bedrooms in the more private south-east wing. Throughout the house, much of the furniture is built-in, custom-designed by Kappe himself.

As luck would have it, the realtor in charge of the sale, luxury estate and architecture specialist Ian L.Brooks, had the pleasure of assisting the late, great Julius Shulman when he shot several homes for Wallpaper* back at the turn of the century. Now Brooks has come full circle, offering this spectacular home to the market for the first time since it was built.

Priced at $11.5m, Brooks tells us that ‘we went into multiple offers within three days of being on market... [The house] a work that is disciplined and deliberate, yet seemingly free and effortless, where traditional spatial boundaries are erased,’ he enthuses, ‘it’s been described as a work of art that is both essay and poem.’

For once, the realtor hyperbole is justified, and Brooks’ contention that the Kappe House delivers a ‘continuous symphony of direct and indirect dappled light that animates the house from sunrise to sunset’ is no exaggeration. The Kappe House awaits its new custodian.

The Kappe House is being sold by Ian L.Brooks, Berkshire Hathaway Santa Monica, IanBrooksEstatesGroup.com, @Sir.IanLBrooks, DesignerEstates.com

This is the latest instalment of The Inside Story, Wallpaper’s series spotlighting intriguing, innovative and industry-leading interior design.

Built in 1925 for James Eads How, the How House is one of Rudolph M Schindler’s most significant early works, now a designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument. The 2,400 sq ft residence exemplifies the architect’s pioneering approach to California modernism. When it changed hands nearly a century after its construction, interior designer Taska Cleveland undertook a careful revitalisation. ‘I focused on interventions that support contemporary life while protecting the integrity of Schindler’s architecture, allowing the house to evolve naturally without losing its original spirit,’ the designer told Wallpaper*. ‘Modern comfort was integrated quietly, allowing the original design to remain clear, legible and fully experienced.’

Step inside a replenished modernist icon

First, original redwood-panelled ceilings, walls, windows and doors were sanded to remove layers of stain, revealing the natural warmth of the wood. Concrete floors were restored and given a red hue inspired by architect John Lautner, reinforcing the house’s modernist lineage.

Cleveland furnished the home to create spaces that invite rest and contemplation – encouraging guests to recline and look upward at Schindler’s rhythmic interplay of wood, glass and concrete. Rather than merely replicating his modernist language, however, she asserted her own authorship, weaving together craftsmanship from different eras and cultures. The entryway sets the tone with a George Nakashima ottoman and a walnut floating console by Madera Build, topped with Japanese stoneware by Michio Koinuma and a Carl-Harry Stålhane dish. In the living room, a built-in sofa upholstered in BDDW green mohair sits beneath an Arien Valizadeh painting. Custom brown velvet lounge chairs face an angora goatskin rug and a bronze-and-zinc coffee table by Marcin Rusak, and a Hans Wegner chair pairs with a Mira Nakashima side table, reinforcing the dialogue between old and new.

A concrete double-sided fireplace connects the living and dining rooms, maintaining Schindler’s emphasis on spatial flow. Custom cherry wood built-in benches nestle beneath mitered glass windows, topped with sculptural objects including a Nepalese resho paper lamp by North Vernon and ceramics by Rando Aso. Above the living room, a mezzanine overlooks the treetops, and Loro Piana linen cushions echo the tones of the surrounding eucalyptus.

In the den, plaster walls inspired by Eric Lloyd Wright’s Anaïs Nin/Rupert Pole house complement the redwood and rust-coloured drapery. Furnishings include a nubuck leather sofa by Soot, a reupholstered Gerrit Rietveld chair and an angular coffee table by Pali Xisto Cornelsen. A custom brass wet bar and cherry wood storage, carefully scribed around the cement fireplace, add functionality while respecting the architecture.

The dining area features vintage Sergio Rodrigues chairs in brown suede surrounding a Joaquim Tenreiro table atop a Tuareg rug. A Jonathan Wateridge painting hangs above a custom wenge and slate console displaying an Arne Bang lamp and a Keita Matsunaga ceramic. In the kitchen, updates include cherry and painted cabinetry with Schindler-style pulls, lava stone countertops and a reflective stainless steel backsplash.

Upstairs and on the lower level, intimate spaces continue the material dialogue. The primary bedroom features bronze mirror panels, vintage Giuseppe Ostuni sconces and a Paul László-inspired bed. A cantilevered desk with Schindler-style detailing forms a study area furnished with a Pierre Jeanneret chair, while the renovated bath includes a monolithic limestone tub and sink.

Guest rooms and baths are home to custom cherry beds, vintage sconces, limestone sinks and plaster walls. Carefully placed artworks and sculptural objects, including pieces from artist Kwangho Lee and Los Angeles gallery Thornton, extend the architectural language into intimate corners.

Through meticulous restoration and sensitive additions, Cleveland ensures that the How House remains both historically significant and vibrantly contemporary. 'I see myself as a collaborator [with Schindler] across time,' she says. 'Preservation is essential, but without interpretation it can become static. My role was to translate his ideas into the present, honouring his experimental spirit rather than freezing it.'

As Palm Springs Modernism Week 2026 approaches and the city prepares to throw itself into the West Coast's biggest celebration of midcentury architecture, tickets are being booked, and programmes are being browsed in an effort to secure a spot at many of the festival's coveted annual events. At the same time, the desert city's modernist architecture marvels are there year-round – albeit many might not be available to visit outside the Modernism Week's activities.

Photographer Trey Burnette captures Palm Springs at night

Enter, local photographer Trey Burnette, whose admiration for all things 20th century – and all things Palm Springs – led him to capture his home city in a unique way; photographing its midcentury offerings at night. Ahead of the Palm Springs Modernism Week 2026 launch, we caught up with him and let him take us on a journey through the city, after dusk.

Palm Springs at night with Trey Burnette

Wallpaper*: Why Palm Springs?

Trey Burnette: Fate, I guess. My mother’s family settled in the deserts of western Texas and eastern New Mexico in the 1800s. My mother was born in Los Angeles, but shortly after her birth, my grandmother and her daughters returned to New Mexico. I was born in Memphis, but I spent much of my early childhood in the Arizona desert after my mother escaped my father’s abuse. The desert was always a place of healing for my family.

Eight years ago, I was living in Los Angeles and hit a point when I needed to take all of my experiences and lessons and reset my life. I had a therapist who noticed that all my survivals and accomplishments had been done with force and that it was time I let things happen with ease. Palm Springs seemed easy. Shortly before my mom died on my sixteenth birthday, we had considered moving here from nearby Riverside, and I had spent a lot of time here as an adult. I loved the architecture, landscape, and energy, so the move seemed natural.

W*: Why shoot during the night?

TB: The light in Palm Springs is beautiful, but I think a lot of people forget that the night is a variation of that beauty. Palm Springs has a dark-sky policy that keeps light pollution to a minimum. The stars, moon, mountains, trees, and minimal man-made light give Palm Springs a special texture and depth at night. I think the illumination of the classic modernist lines of the architecture against that texture and depth is quite striking. Most architectural photography is done in daylight; people forget that the architecture also lives at night. The shadows and contrast of illumination and darkness give the lines and form of structures a distinct and enhanced quality not seen in the sun.

I have always found beauty in dark places; I did this innately as a child in some of my scariest moments. Finding a light in the dark is a way to acknowledge a greater, more glorious truth beyond any current unpleasant circumstance. Dark places serve as a place to find our brightness.

W*: Talk to me about how you selected your subjects.

TB: There are many iconic structures in Palm Springs, but there are also many lesser-known but equally important examples of mid-century architecture here. I wanted to look at the icons in a new way and bring some visibility to underappreciated works. I had an idea of subjects I wanted to photograph, but when an unplanned structure caught my eye, I parked my car, got out, and took the shot. Finding illuminated structures that were framed by the night and uncluttered was key to a shot.

W*: Do you think modernist architecture has a specific appeal to photographers?

TB: I do not know; I know my own tastes tend to favour modernist and contemporary architecture and design. However, for me, I find it more compelling to put my tastes aside and look at all architecture and art with curiosity. I like to understand what an architect, artist, and movement were trying to achieve during that period. I think that approach lends itself to not only appreciating the design, as well as giving insight into the culture and technology of the time. The more I understand a subject, the more I can put my voice into a photo.

I recently travelled to Barcelona a couple of times and toured most of Antoni Gaudí’s landmark works, examples of Catalan modernism. On the surface, his work is very different from the modernism in Palm Springs, but when one understands the driving forces behind the designs (the use of new technologies, incorporating natural light, and addressing modern living), one sees the underlying relationships and principles for great design. This is why I look to the great photographers for inspiration, what fundamentals made their work innovative and keep their work relevant.

W*: Tell me more about your methods and way of working. Do you shoot on film?

TB: I tend to let my intuition lead when I create. Most of my work has been done or initiated when I have been out exploring the world and am captivated by something beautiful, striking, or unsettling—maybe all three.

I did my first photo series of a night out on the Sunset Strip in high school with a disposable camera. It was a storytelling project, and my English teacher said I had something, but I didn’t want to believe I had that talent, so I went on my way. When iPhones and Instagram came along, I started getting requests to use my photos of places I had visited. I finally bought a proper camera, a Leica V-lux 5, and started shooting with more intention. My work started getting published, and in 2024, I got an honourable mention in my first show with the Los Angeles Center of Photography. I wanted to improve, so I did a photo review. The pros told me I had a natural eye but needed to work on my processing skills. I took some classes taught by Josh Withers and Rollence Patugan at LACP. I love education and know there is always something to learn.

My work has been digital, but I am taking Barbara Boissevain’s dark room class, so I am now also shooting on film. I recently took Eric Joseph’s printing class and learned how much different types of paper affect photos. I finally bought strobe lighting and have been doing studio work. All are fascinating processes.

W*: Is there anything specific on the technical side that is special about this particular project?

TB: An understanding of the relationship between aperture, shutter speed, and ISO was imperative for getting the best shots for this series. But I think the biggest lessons with this project were practising patience and having a willingness to keep on when things weren’t working.

W*: How long did it take you to capture the series? How many buildings does it include in total?

TB: I went out on four nights close to midnight for about four or five hours. Then I did one shorter night to shoot a structure I missed. In the end, there are twenty-three structures in the series.

W*: The Palm Springs Modernism Week is coming up. Do you have your eye on any specific events?

TB: I recently finished writing a comedic novel and TV series set in Palm Springs about a photographer living in a Paul R. Williams building, so I am definitely seeing Designing the Desert, and Other Landscapes: The Architecture of Paul R. Williams. I will also see Googie, a few other documentaries, take a tour I haven’t done, and check out the Modernism Art District Tour. I recommend taking a bus tour for first timers; they give an informational overview of everything one might want to see.

Your Palm Springs Modernism Week 2026 itinerary

Newcomers Reception at CAMP

First time in Palm Springs during the festival, and unsure what to choose to visit? This event, which mixes newcomers with seasoned visitors and locals, aims to answer all the questions a Palm Springs Modernism Week novice might have.

When: 12 February 2026, 02:00 PM
Where: CAMP, Hyatt Palm Springs

Keynote Presentation: Elizabeth Diller, Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Keynote presenter for this year's Modernism Week, renowned architect and co-founder Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, will be talking about her work in a dedicated, one-off event during the festival.

When: 14 February 2026, 12:59 PM to 03:30 PM
Where: Annenberg Theater, Palm Springs Art Museum

The Charles & Ray Eames Foundation: Preserving Legacy, Inspiring the Future

In a special talk, Eames Demetrios (grandson of Charles and Ray Eames and chairman of the board of the Charles & Ray Eames Foundation) and Adrienne Luce, the foundation's executive director, will be taking the conversation around modernism to LA, discussing the Eames' lasting influence in the field.

When: 18 February 2026, 09:00 AM
Where: Annenberg Theater, Palm Springs Art Museum

2026 World Monuments Fund / Knoll Modernism Prize Ceremony

Celebrate one of the world's biggest honours in modernist design and attend the 2026 World Monuments Fund / Knoll Modernism Prize Ceremony, taking place this year at Palm Springs during the festival - and learn all about this year's winner, the Africa Hall in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

When: 18 February 2026
Where: Annenberg Theater, Palm Springs Art Museum

Palm Springs Modernism Week runs 12-22 February 2026

modernismweek.com

If there’s one thing that Wallpaper* does well, it’s houses – spotlighting architecturally arresting gems from around the globe and spanning the spectrum of modern design. Our inboxes are overflowing with news of the world’s most boundary-pushing architectural projects, and we strive to bring you the very best.

To ensure you don’t miss a thing – and to showcase the scope of residential architecture today – we’ve launched a monthly series: The Architecture Edit. Each instalment will highlight our favourite houses of the month: buildings that demonstrate creative planning, innovative methods and, of course, aesthetic excellence.

A Californian community

Set within California’s Sea Ranch community, The House of Four Ecologies is a coastal retreat designed by a group of architect friends. Led by James Leng alongside Natasha Sadikin, Juney Lee and Hoang Nguyen, the 1,600 sq ft home is conceived as four distinct volumes nestled into a riparian corridor of firs, grasses and shrubs. Each space is oriented to a different ecological condition, creating varied relationships to ocean, garden, meadow and forest. Inside, rooms unfold as experiential moments: the Ocean Room frames the Pacific through a single large window; the Garden Room blurs interior and exterior with sliding walls and a courtyard; the kitchen and dining area forms the social heart; and an ensuite studio overlooks the meadow beyond.

A sunken garden home

Designed by architect couple Deborah Saunt and David Hills of DSDHA, Covert House is a discreet yet radical response to London’s housing constraints. Tucked behind Clapham Old Town’s historic terraces, the house is invisible from the street, sinking partly below ground. Built on a speculative backland site, the project became both a family home and a testing ground for the architects’ broader ideas about urban living. Cast concrete defines the structure, alternating between raw and refined finishes, while large skylights and glazed façades flood the interior with daylight. The inverted layout places living spaces above and bedrooms below,. Reading a bit like a pavilion set within greenery, the house demonstrates how dense cities can accommodate inventive, sustainable architecture.

A Tbilisi apartment

In a historic art nouveau building in Tbilisi’s Sololaki district, designers Nino Nozadze and Eka Papamichail have reimagined an apartment for Georgian chef Tekuna Gachechiladze. Original parquet floors, tall ceilings and double doors preserve the building’s character, while new material interventions introduce warmth and clarity. Walnut furniture, plastered walls and a sculptural coffered ceiling shape the living spaces, anchored by a long dining table. The kitchen combines professional stainless-steel surfaces with generous daylight and garden views, functioning as both workspace and social hub. Throughout the apartment, muted ochres, greens and turquoise accents act as subtle architectural gestures, while bathrooms introduce marble and travertine tones.

A Canadian ranch

Daisy Ranch, designed by Olson Kundig for builder and fabricator Patrick Powers, is a home rooted in adventure, craft and landscape. Set on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, the cabin-like residence responds to its rugged surroundings with durable materials and a straightforward architectural framework. Inspired partly by the brick farmhouse Powers grew up in, the house features expansive windows that forge a strong connection to nature. The interior acts as a living archive of family history, filled with found objects and personal artefacts, including a canoe suspended from the ceiling. Designed to withstand the energy of family life, Daisy Ranch is a robust home that celebrates making and memory.

A Richard Neutra landmark

Richard Neutra’s 1960 Sale House in Los Angeles was listed for sale this month, offering a rare opportunity to inhabit a meticulously restored modernist landmark. Originally commissioned by Robert and Elsa Sale, the single-storey home exemplifies Neutra’s signature glass-walled design, with fluid living spaces radiating from a central kitchen. Panoramic glazing frames views of protected greenbelt land, city lights and the Pacific Ocean, allowing the house to shift with the seasons. Original details – including built-in furniture and mosaic tile work by Elsa Sale – were preserved during a sensitive restoration completed in 2021. The house has always remained fully lived in rather than museum-like, embodying Neutra’s belief that architecture should enhance wellbeing.

A Czech chalet

Na Kukačkách is a contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional alpine chalet, designed by edit! architects in the Giant Mountains of the Czech Republic. While the exterior adheres strictly to local building codes – with a timber-clad form, gabled roof and stone plinth – the interior introduces a bold, vertically connected spatial experience. Built using prefabricated cross-laminated timber panels, the chalet maximises daylight and views through large-format glazing on its freer façades. The main living space occupies the first floor, where a soaring timber ceiling and expansive west-facing window frame the mountainous landscape. Bedrooms are tucked into the eaves above, linked by a gallery that overlooks the living area.

A calming Palma home

Casa Óculo, designed by OHLAB on the outskirts of Palma, is a contemporary Mediterranean home shaped by light and material ageing. Defined by a large flat roof stretching across the site, the house is organised beneath thick lime-rendered walls that rhythmically divide interior spaces. A circular oculus punctures the roof, functioning as a domestic sundial that tracks the sun’s movement throughout the day. Materials – lime mortar, stone floors, wood and brass – were chosen for their ability to weather gracefully, and a lush Mediterranean garden is treated as an extension of the house, merging interior and exterior life. Casa Óculo offers a calm, sensory environment where architecture quietly frames the passage of time.

A woodland retreat

What began as a simple weekend retreat for a New York City couple evolved into a lifestyle transformation anchored by architecture and farming. Designed by Desai Chia Architecture, this house sits atop an 86-acre site in Columbia County with sweeping views of the Catskill Mountains. The low, elongated structure is organised around a central glass-walled living space, with bedroom wings extending on either side. A sweeping curved roof, inspired by the silhouette of oak leaves, shapes light, directs rainwater and softens the building’s relationship to the land. As the project unfolded, a working farm emerged alongside the house, turning the retreat into an immersive, seasonal way of life deeply connected to place.

A London retrofit

Trace is a low-carbon retrofit project by Bureau de Change that reimagines a 1980s brick building in Euston as contemporary multi-family housing rooted in circular design principles. Rather than demolish the existing structure, the architects retained and extended it, adding two floors to create five new apartments. The most distinctive feature is the bespoke glass-reinforced concrete façade, made using crushed bricks salvaged from the original building. Inspired by Georgian proportions and arches, and ntegrated into the wider Euston Area Plan, Trace demonstrates how reuse, material innovation and architectural sensitivity can offer a compelling model for urban housing.

About an hour-and-a-half north of San Francisco, sheltered from the rest of the world by a lush canopy of oaks, is a dynamic young family’s year-round escape from city life. But this place is more than a quick getaway – it’s pure devotion to the art of living.

Located on an acre-and-a-half lot in the heart of Sonoma’s wine country, the house offers sweeping views of the Mayacamas Mountains and the region’s famed vineyards. What was once a traditional 1960s Spanish hacienda-style home has been transformed into a stunning contemporary retreat thanks to Chroma, the San Francisco-based interior design studio led by partners Alexis Tompkins and Leann Conquer.

‘[Before we got involved] there was a discussion about whether to embrace the Spanish style or modernise it,’ says Tompkins, noting a whole-house renovation by award-winning Oakland-based firm building Lab set their design stage. ‘In the end, they really wanted to modernise it because of their incredible art collection.’

And, while the homeowners are serious art collectors who serve as board members of a prestigious contemporary art museum, being parents to two soon-to-be teenage daughters also meant creating an equally welcoming, playful environment. ‘They’re super laid-back,’ says Conquer. ‘The kids are into music and reading, and activities like archery and fencing, and really they just love being outside.’

To that end, the design duo conceived a vibrant, textural and wholly mid-century aesthetic that paid a convivial deference to the native landscape surrounding the 3,900 sq ft, four-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bathroom home.

In the living room, a full wall of sliding doors opens onto a pool deck and the countryside beyond. ‘It’s very much indoor-outdoor living and, although they wanted an overall casual feel, [she] wanted this particular space to be a little “turned up,”’ said Tompkins.

Central to the room, a pair of vintage 1950s lounge chairs by Lawrence Peabody were reupholstered in a patterned ecru fabric by La Manach. ‘We liked the delicateness of the silhouettes in contrast with something that was a little more solid, warm and earthy like the Kerman Coffee Table in natural cork by Egg Collective.’

Completing the main gathering area, a bespoke rug, a walnut-framed lounger chair by Rob Parry, a curved custom-designed sectional in a chartreuse mohair, and a large-scale work by abstract American artist Wyatt Kahn coalesce effortlessly.

Similarly, the dining room opens onto the gloriously endless native plant-filled yard, envisioned by Lucy McFadden Landscape Design. ‘We often design the dining tables for our projects,’ Tompkins shares, noting the table was handmade in San Francisco by Julian Giuntoli Custom Furniture.

A set of 1960 rattan-backed Danish dining chairs, upholstered in blue leather. Above, a pendant finished in iridescent chromate by Luft Tanaka Studio adds a modernist touch. Conquer, ‘The rattan brings in a more casual reference while its perforations mirror those in the chandelier,’ Conquer explains.

On the wall behind the table, a painting from the 1970s by Latvian-born American painter Andrew Jansons was a gift from the late artist to one of the clients' fathers, and, at the head of the dining table, a collection of abstract portraits by Kenturah Davis give the impression of being regular dinner guests.

Elsewhere in the home, works like a 1910 impressionist portrait by J. Phillip Schmand and a petite oil, Still Life with Smelt, by 19th-century English-born American painter Samuel Marsden Brookes are juxtaposed with a complex assemblage by contemporary Chicana artist Lorena Ochoa (that include elements such as a Toyota truck tailgate) and a pair of 2019 cyanotypes, by Sean McFarland.

Likewise, a separate guest cottage on the property presents itself as a work of art itself. ‘The walls and ceiling are so epic,’ says Tompkins of the Chroma-designed mural — a dreamy watercolor-like landscape — that was brought to life by Rafael Arana. ‘I’m really into atmospheric impact in a space where it’s all-consuming — you walk in and you feel transformed; it’s kind of magical.’

Here, furnishings like a Tito Agnoli lounge chair by Tito Agnoli, a custom coffee table, a marble top dining table by Sergio Rodrigues, and a set of four Gio Ponti dining chairs feel right at home with artworks from Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Martinez and Shannon Ebner.

For the clients — and designers alike — the country compound is the ultimate expression of l’art de vivre. ‘The homeowners are very open and experimental which matched perfectly with [our] design process that often pulls from obscure references,’ shares Tompkins. ‘And they were excited that we were excited about that kind of conceptual approach.’

In Sonoma County, California, a new coastal home emerges in the established Sea Ranch community. First developed in the 1960s, the area's wood-clad homes often feature architecture that blends modernism with a tactile, somewhat rustic feel, reflecting the tranquil nature of its context. In this setting, The House of Four Ecologies is a new residence located in the wider site's 10-mile expanse. It was designed by a small group of friends who wanted to share, enjoy and have access to the rugged coastal environment.

Tour a new coastal home in California

The design of the 1,600 square-foot residence was led by James Leng, who is also an architect and founding partner of the San Francisco-based architecture office Figure. Joining him are his life partner, Natasha Sadikin, a development director at Frolic Community; and friends Juney Lee, a professor of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, and Hoang Nguyen, an associate principal at Grimshaw Architects.

With parallel careers in the built environment, the friends shared a deep understanding of the concept of a sanctuary. As a result, the house was reimagined as a cluster of four volumes and designed to immerse itself within the landscape, nestled against a riparian corridor, adorned with a family of firs, wild coastal grasses and coffeeberry bushes that scatter across the landscape.

This multi-levelled mood board and inspiration lies behind the home's design, making sure that the residence offers a variety of visual and spatial orientations as it takes in the surrounding landscape.

Inside, the first living room, also playfully referred to as the 'Ocean Room,' is surrounded by a built-in banquette seating on three sides, creating a wrap-around gathering space, a cosy fire stove, and a large window that frames the Pacific Ocean.

The second room - the 'Garden Room' - is described as a room within a room, as it features a walled garden and a courtyard deck within the planted landscape. The room offers a series of sliding doors that allow the space to be flexible and, therefore, multifunctional.

Placed off the courtyard is the kitchen and dining space. This is the largest open-plan area in the house, and it acts as the heart of the home. Grounding the room, a large table is available to accommodate communal gatherings. The kitchen itself is a simple bar with a large horizontal awning window over the sink. More windows and skylights allow for a gentle breeze and daylight to trickle into the space.

The fourth room, just off the kitchen, is an ensuite studio space, overlooking the meadow outside. This room is spacious enough to fit a bed, a sitting area, and a long work table along the window wall.

Says Leng: ‘One might imagine enjoying the morning light on the ocean in the living room, basking in the warm noon sun in the sheltered courtyard, sharing a meal in the dining room tucked between trees, and adjourning to the ensuite under the soft dusk glow of the meadow to end the day.’

Navigating the house is like ambling through the landscape, a peaceful and comforting journey that feeds off and mirrors its natural context.

For a true design-in-the-desert experience, Casamia is a new contemporary house providing stylish remote retreats. Designed by the artist and musician Giancarlo Rondani, the custom desert house is located in Joshua Tree, California. Rondani, who has Brazilian, Peruvian, and Italian ancestry, usually works in motion graphics and 3D design. The Casamia project arose out of his own interest in architecture and is his first major built project.

‘I started experimenting on my own home [in Los Angeles], rethinking the interior layout and redesigning the whole backyard,’ the designer says, ‘Because my everyday tools are Cinema 4D and Photoshop, I used them to model and visualize everything first, almost as a way to prove the ideas to myself before committing to construction.’

From here, Rondani gained the confidence to translate his ideas in a full-scale new build project. ‘The desert has always been my place to reset from LA, and Joshua Tree in particular has a special energy,’ he says. The search for a suitable plot took place during Covid. ‘It took nearly a year to find the right piece of land,’ Rondani recalls, ‘it was completely raw with no utilities, water, or power.’

Casamia has taken three years to come together, guided by Rondani’s visualisation skills. ‘I used the same tools I work with every day to design the house,’ he says, ‘I built the entire project digitally first, studying the sun path, light behaviour, and wind direction and even how the desert would interact with the architecture before anything was constructed.’

The end result is a classically elegant modern villa, a structure that hugs low to the ground and directly interfaces with the desert terrain via careful landscaping. Part Case Study House, part Palm Springs modern, with a touch of minimalist sculpture, the black clad house celebrates the play of sunlight across the façade, changing patterns of light and straightforward construction materials.

‘Once we secured the land, the design and construction process unfolded over more than three years, from concept and sun path studies to the final build,’ says Rondani, ‘the process shaped the final form and the very minimal warm aesthetic you will see in the images.’

Arranged as two pavilions flanking a pool and firepit, Casamia features a main bedroom, two auxiliary bedrooms and large open-plan kitchen/diner. Covered walkways and terraces surround the structure to shade the sun and minimise the built footprint. Reservations are open now.

Book the house via CasamiaResort.com and also via Airbnb Luxe

Dramatic hillside residences are a Los Angeles speciality. Richard Neutra’s Lovell House and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Sturges Residence lead the pack, along with many other classics and innumerable DIY dwellings that exploited ‘unbuildable’ sites back in the days when such land was practically given away. Young Spanish architect Diego Cano-Lasso has made a notable addition to this legacy. Growing up in Madrid in the 1990s, he would hang out in the studios of his father and grandfather, both architects, learning how to use AutoCAD.

He remembers how much his grandfather enjoyed his work, and wanted to be like him. Leafing through a monograph, he chanced upon Julius Shulman’s 1960 nocturnal photograph of Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House in the Hollywood Hills, depicting two women in white dresses, seemingly suspended in a capsule of steel and glass, floating above a carpet of lights. For Cano-Lasso, it ignited a dream of living in LA and, years later, he moved there, got his master’s degree at SCI-Arc and settled in the city.

Tour Cano House, a colourful Los Angeles hills dwelling

In 2019, he teamed up with SelgasCano, the Madrid firm co-founded by his aunt Lucia and her husband José Selgas, to construct the Second Home Hollywood co-working space (now operating under different owners as The Preserve). They also purchased a steep site on Mount Washington in north-east LA, and each designed a house for themselves, side by side, similar in construction, but radically different in appearance. SelgasCano indulged its love of colour, cladding the exterior in polychromatic recycled aluminium tubes, an echo of the pavilion it designed for the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2015.

Cano-Lasso’s incarnation is a lightweight, two-storey, post-and-beam structure with a narrow garden. The house cantilevers out from the hillside, with decked terraces at both levels offering views of the Elysian Valley and Hollywood Hills. Glass doors pivot open on both sides to capture the California breezes. ‘The idea behind this house was to create an environment conducive to the lifestyle LA offers: abundant natural light, a connection to nature, enchanting city views and tranquillity,’ says Cano-Lasso. ‘I feel most at home in the garden. It’s a sanctuary, looking out to the city through the living room, yet sheltered from it; surrounded by flowers, birds and the soothing sound of a fountain.’

The first structural engineer that the architect approached insisted the design wouldn’t meet the city’s tough building code. The second made adjustments to secure approval, and a team of skilled workers slotted 42ft-long glulam beams into steel tube columns by hand, tying them back to the fully-exposed concrete retaining wall. Meanwhile, lower-level rooms sport ribbed wood ceilings. Cano-Lasso finds a lyrical rhythm in the repetition of the joists and ribs, recalling Goethe’s definition of architecture as ‘frozen music’.

The floors are made of American red oak, while walls are lined in radiata pine plywood. Cano-Lasso had come to appreciate plywood while living in Rudolph Schindler’s Sachs apartments – it was one of the Austrian-born architect’s favourite materials. To block the intense heat of the westerly afternoon sun, louvred redwood planks on the terraces can be turned and wooden Venetian blinds lowered.

The floorplan, drawn up by Cano-Lasso’s father, features an open-plan living and dining area, which opens onto the garden, and two bedrooms on the upper level, while a spiral staircase descends to another bedroom, an office and recreational areas on the lower level. Cano-Lasso’s brother, Alejandro, who sometimes works under the name Doctor Cato, created a mural of vibrantly coloured zellige tiles, imported from Morocco, to animate a concrete wall in the garden. The pivoting glass doors were brought from Spain, and ceramic downspouts were repurposed as wall lamps.

The house is sparsely furnished with a series of thoughtfully curated, custom-made pieces. Alejandro created several lamps, as well as some chairs inspired by the work of Wright and Schindler. Andrew Riiska, an artist whom Cano-Lasso met at SCI-Arc, contributed a bench and stool enriched with colourful upholstered blobs. Two massive boulders, found on site, were craned into the house before the windows were installed and double as side tables. At the outset, Cano-Lasso, his wife and brother moved things around to achieve a satisfying composition. ‘We were looking for pieces that were individually appealing and had a relationship with each other, but I didn’t want to lose the sense of open space,’ says Cano-Lasso.

Building this house was no picnic. It took seven years from design to completion, including a three-year shutdown during the pandemic, but it validated the skill of a fledgling architect whose website is full of speculative designs for fanciful hillside houses. Even if these go unrealised, Cano-Lasso has demonstrated that he can master the challenge of a difficult site, creating a home that is down-to-earth yet infused with poetry. It should serve as a springboard to many future commissions.

diegocanolasso.com

selgascano.net

This article appears in the December 2025 Entertaining Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 6 November. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Robert Stone aims to create architecture that expands beyond the realm of traditional design ideals. When working on a new house design, he always explores fresh possibilities without limitations, looking for angles that not only challenge the status quo but turn it on its head.

In fact, in creating anything from clothing – a custom-fitted white T-shirt – to a strap-on sub-woofer, Stone has brought a fresh perspective to every design he has developed, while going for aesthetics that set his work apart from the current mainstream. His early career was spent overseeing architecture projects in Los Angeles while developing an art practice with gallery and museum exhibits in the US and Europe. Eventually, this journey led him back to architecture, offering a take that feels entirely unique to the field.

Robert Stone's new desert house case study

Stone’s architectural style looks different because he thinks differently about architecture. ‘Like all other architects, I am enamoured with the abstract qualities of form and spatial compositions, but I am also interested in creating new aesthetics from current culture and the meaning that we attach to buildings and materials.’ As he’s not interested in perpetuating a fake past or future, Stone found a vast unexplored realm to make architecture that connects to ‘who we are now.’

After building the highly praised Rosa Muerta house in Joshua Tree – which was the site for a campaign photo shoot by Saint Laurent – Stone’s new home in Palm Springs comprises a main dwelling and a guest house. His inspiration finds its roots in its locale and Southern California culture, from Chicano to modernist. ‘Dreamer / Lil’ Dreamer’ isn't about a client or the architect, but endeavours to address the current ethos of its territory, while creating connections that might resonate with a wider art and design audience.

Examining the sloping roof

Almost like an exaggerated A-Frame, the project's sloped roof with reflective tiles and the abstract stacking of breeze blocks in different sizes showcase how Stone works hard to challenge the norm of what a contemporary Palm Springs house might look like. ‘I want to get them past “Wow, this looks different”, to “this makes me look at things differently”.’

The first noticeable element is that the roof touches the ground, but the floors don't. The house's shape emerged from a new formal concept. ‘It is a modern glass box and a Spanish tract house re-spawned at the same coordinates and digitally edited together,’ he notes. ‘The roof sits on the dirt like a dropped lowrider, while the floors hover above the earth as cantilevered planes.

‘In most homes, nothing happens until you get four feet above a person's head. And I like to do things that engage the body at the ankle, knee, hip, shoulders, and head. So, by bringing the roof down to the ground, it gives it this entirely different relationship to the body and the ground.’

This desert house certainly wakes up the senses, which is one of Stone’s goals, along with reinventing formal and design relationships while creating dynamic spaces. ‘Here, we are doing this by reinvigorating the basic vocabulary of desert architecture,' he says.

Astroturf and breeze blocks

Born and raised in Palm Springs, Stone draws from all elements of this context: architecture from classic modernism to Spanish, abandoned tract houses to golf courses, the desert lifestyle, multi-cultural chic, art, music, design, and fashion aesthetics, all converge to help him produce something that feels ‘relevant here and now.’

‘Palm Springs has an amazing history of iconic houses, but I was always lost by its disconnect with contemporary culture,’ he says. ‘In my past work, I have gravitated toward raw desert areas where I can produce highly cultured architecture that is amplified by its contrast with nature.' While Stone aims to move beyond the borders of modern architecture, he’s not working in opposition to modernism. ‘I just want to make architecture that engages our time. We're alive now. I tell my clients that the audience is not them or me, it's the world.’

To that end, Stone decided to elevate the artificial astroturf lawn – an element that is here reframed as a key building material. ‘It intersects the house, pool, and landscape in ways that a real lawn couldn’t, and it flows into the living room interior to rethink our connection to nature with a candour that fits our time, and I think it's more interesting in those qualities than just a perfect lawn.’

Stone also redefined a cornerstone of Southern California's traditional handcrafted materials and architecture, the Spanish tiled roof. The pottery-made tiles on the Dreamer home glitter with new glazes and four shades of silver that suggest a new kind of ‘California Chicano futurism’.

Stone strives to find a new kind of truth and beauty in his work with everyday items that are not normally celebrated. Case in point, the air-conditioner units that were transformed into gold-coated cube sculptures set on prominent podiums and presented as ‘idealised representations of ubiquitous equipment’ that are usually hidden. These pieces are now put in the spotlight as the ‘jewellery’ of the house, and an ‘honest assertion of our relationship to nature’.

Stone also approaches the quintessential, often mass-produced, modernist breeze block more like an artist’s composition on a canvas or sculpture. The house features perforated walls in various patterns and configurations that express both the beauty and limitations of its machine aesthetics, blending them with handmade craft. ‘Each block placed in the wall is a decision made by a person – arranged to pull the eye along it, create open and dense areas, and to suggest a pictorial reading.’

Mirrored ceilings and Spanish fusion

In the stainless steel and green-coloured kitchen, Stone took inspiration from Japanese Tansu cabinets and Prada handbags. Crocodile-textured leather and custom-made stainless hardware help create a new domestic interior aesthetic.

He is also seeking fresh surface combinations and uses ‘tension between colours to find new and unique beauty’. Copper pink, metallic avocado, shades of silver, purple, and green hues are combined in a way that draws from contemporary fashion references. ‘I went to the Miuccia Prada school of colour,’ he says. ‘I love colours that kind of like work against each other, but then come together beautifully.’

Polished stainless wrought iron at the front of the house turns the ubiquitous indicator of perceived ‘bad neighbourhoods’ in Southern California into an abstract sculptural form of Spanish fusion. ‘What would California be without that stuff? Our culture is 50 per cent Mexican-American,’ he says.

‘There's a little bit of a strategy that runs through a lot of my work. If you can change the proportions of something – and fashion designers do this all the time – you can make something really connect differently and wake up your senses. Lowriders do that by taking a 1963 Impala that is stock height, but if you drop it five inches, everything about it changes, and it becomes kind of sinister.’

Along with ‘refreshing the roof-ground relationship’, Stone’s use of the square mirrored ceiling panels is recurrent in his practice. They blend inside and outside by reflecting the desert flora when you look at the ceiling, while bringing natural daylight into the room.

One element that Stone pointed out about the mirrored ceiling is that not all the panels are perfectly set, so it’s a little bit like a disco ball; when you walk around, everything moves, and the reflections jump a little bit from the panels. It's a bold move. ‘You think it's going to be kind of tacky, but if it's detailed and done right, it can be taken seriously. It feels like what California architecture should be, but it can also be sexy and kind of druggie. That is who we are.’

In the end, Stone wants to make architecture that inspires the audience to attach meaning to it. ‘And, rather than being above or outside of culture, I am right there alongside the audience, questioning and connecting this architecture to the world we live in.’

robertstonedesign.com

If Ed Ruscha made a chocolate bar, it would hit just the right note between Californian bounty and playful elegance. Lucky, then, that his first foray into sweet edible art embodies exactly this, with a collaboration with andSons Chocolatiers bringing an arty spin to ‘Made in California’, a seriously good chocolate.

Why chocolate? ‘We think the best kind of art is one that raises questions and opens a dialogue,’ says Marc Covitz of the family-run, Beverly Hills-based chocolatier. ‘This particular work always resonated and was an invitation to explore what Made in California means to us. We grew up seeing Ruscha's work and were re-inspired by his recent retrospectives at MoMA and LACMA. We approached the studio and were so pleased with their willingness to collaborate. After many iterations, the project fell into place quite easily.’

The result is made of three ingredients: blood orange olive oil from Petaluma, Sonoma County; sea salt from Tomales Bay; and 73 per cent Peruvian dark chocolate roasted by Chef Thomas Keller in Napa Valley. It is cast in a handcrafted mould of a section of California's Central Valley, stretching from the Pacific Ocean down to the Santa Lucia Mountains. ‘Chef Sandy Tran dreamed up this visual expression, of a region known for agriculture,’ Covitz adds. ‘From her experience of being the executive pastry chef of The French Laundry in Napa. Chef Sandy was familiar with many Californian organic farms. She and our culinary team take an ingredient-first approach and hand-select each vendor. It is also meaningful to our family business to identify and support other independent businesses.’

The chocolate comes in a cloth-wrapped box printed with a reproduction of Ruscha’s lithograph, Made in California (1971), courtesy of the artist and Gagosian. Says Covitz, ‘[He’s] one of the great artists of our time, [and] we could not resist the opportunity to craft a playful response to the work.’

Made in California is $295, in an edition of 300, and available from early December 2025 for pick-up in Beverly Hills or USA and Canada shipping, and-sons.com; sign up on the website to get notified

and-sons.com/california

If there’s one thing that Wallpaper* does well, it’s houses – spotlighting architecturally arresting gems from around the globe and spanning the spectrum of modern design. Our inboxes are overflowing with news of the world’s most boundary-pushing architectural projects, and we strive to bring you the very best.

To ensure you don’t miss a thing – and to showcase the scope of residential architecture today – we’ve launched a monthly series: The Architecture Edit. Each instalment will highlight our favourite houses of the month: buildings that demonstrate creative planning, innovative methods and, of course, aesthetic excellence.

A terraced home transformation

Architects Edward Williams and Laura Carrara-Cagni of Cagni Williams Associates reimagined this Edwardian terraced house in south London as a sustainable, light-filled home. A striking new ‘gallery’ extension – clad in Corten steel and glass – replaces the old conservatory and brings a sculptural modernity to the rear façade. The rest of design balances bold forms with natural warmth, linking home and garden through large pivoting doors and oak-lined interiors. From the outset, sustainability guided the project, which features an air-source heat pump and underfloor heating.

A Malibu beach pad

Interior designer Pamela Shamshiri has transformed a 1990s Malibu beachfront compound for producer Jana Bezdek, fusing Hollywood glamour with Brazilian modernism. Inspired by Lina Bo Bardi and James Bond, the main house features a sculptural De Sede sofa, white terrazzo floors and a curved timber bar, all cast in an elegant taupe-to-caramel palette. Elsewhere, a crimson screening room exudes California luxury, and mirrored walls ensure ocean views from the bedroom and office. Outside, lush landscaping and tiered terraces further blur the boundary between indoor and out.

An Arizona compound

Prompted by a zoning law change that sanctioned attached secondary units, architect Benjamin Hall converted this suburban Phoenix house into a multigenerational desert compound. Using cost-efficient concrete masonry units (CMU), he designed a 1,700 sq ft addition that harmonises with the desert landscape both aesthetically and environmentally – thick, insulated walls, concrete floors and maple cabinetry create a minimalist yet welcoming interior, while sliding doors open onto a courtyard planted with native flora and framed by mountain views.

A Canadian modernist gem

Perched on Bowen Island near Vancouver, Morse House (1983) by Dick Mann of Thompson Berwick Pratt epitomises West Coast modernism. Crafted from cedar, fir, stone and glass, the 21,526 sq ft residence immerses its occupants in forest and ocean panoramas. A cedar staircase descends to a glazed façade surrounded by gardens and waterfalls, leading to an atrium centred around a 50ft pool and a soaring great hall. With its guesthouse, gym and private dock, this handcrafted home achieves a rare equilibrium between architecture and nature.

An eco-brutalist sanctuary

On the outskirts of Hyderabad, Antriya by 23 Degrees Design Shift redefines brutalism as lush, livable and sustainable. Constructed from local Khammam sandstone and Markapuram slate, and softened with reclaimed teak and abundant greenery, the 14,500 sq ft residence accommodates three generations of one family. Cascading plants and lily pad-filled ponds blur boundaries between architecture and nature while passively regulating the tropical climate. Concealed behind boundary walls, the home seems to emerge from the undergrowth as you approach – a tactile, nature-infused reimagining of brutalism.

A Canadian cabin 

In Ontario’s wooded hills, AKB Architects’ Timbertop is a minimalist four-bedroom retreat designed for family gatherings and outdoor adventure. The single-storey, barn-inspired home marries rural simplicity with modern refinement. Clad in crisp white to contrast with the surrounding evergreens, the home withstands heavy snow and wind while maintaining warmth and intimacy under its pitched gabled roof. Open-plan living, kitchen and library spaces create a cosy refuge amid the winter landscape.

A rainforest retreat

Set deep in the Costa Rican jungle, Studio House by Dagmar Štěpánová of Formafatal appears to float above a slope on concrete and Corten steel supports, minimising impact on the terrain. Designed as Štěpánová’s personal residence, the 125 sq m structure consists of open terraces, raw concrete interiors and a glazing-free ocean-facing window which immerses the home in the sounds and textures of the forest. Two simple bedrooms and an infinity pool continue the elemental aesthetic, while the rooftop and east terraces offer uninterrupted views of the Pacific.

A brick and concrete home

In Ahmedabad, architect Vaissnavi Shukl’s Teen Vaults reinterprets brick-and-concrete construction. Originally conceived as a weekend retreat, it evolved into a full-time family residence organised around three vaulted volumes – one for for dining, one for living, and one for reading. Exposed brick walls, terrazzo floors and teak furniture evoke a grounded simplicity, while a folded concrete staircase with a wooden-bead railing adds sculptural elegance. A central courtyard surrounded by mango and frangipani trees serves as the home’s spiritual heart.

For about as long as there’s been Hollywood, there’s been Malibu. A century ago, along an exclusive stretch of sand known as the Malibu Colony, you might have chanced upon Gloria Swanson and Charlie Chaplin engaged in a lively game of table tennis; these days, you might bump into Tom Hanks or Flea. Interior designer Pamela Shamshiri had two very different stars in mind, however, for her recent reimagining of a family house: Lina Bo Bardi and James Bond. ‘We wanted it to be Malibu at its most glamorous,’ she says.

Luckily, the property itself was not short of cinematic charisma. The narrow, half-acre plot featured three structures, built in the late 1990s, that bookended a garden and a pool. These included a pair of two-storey volumes containing a 5,000 sq ft primary residence and guest suites. From the beach-facing main house, with its broad expanses of windows and low-slung profile, it felt like you could almost touch the Pacific Ocean.

Tour this modern Malibu beach house

For the property’s owner Jana Bezdek, co-founder of production company FourthWall Theatrical, the home fulfilled a lifelong yearning to be on the water. ‘My husband is from a neighbourhood called Rustic Canyon and I grew up in Del Mar, California. We were always drawn to being close to the beach,’ she says.

So when she came across the property four years ago, Bezdek pounced. The house would not only serve as a beach escape for her family, but it would also be a romantic nod to her husband, who proposed to her on that very section of beach. To realise her vision, Bezdek tapped Shamshiri, who had previously designed her family’s main residence in LA, as well as her New York pied-à-terre. ‘She was the only person I could imagine working with,’ Bezdek says.

Shamshiri was struck by the compound’s low-slung modernist vocabulary, something of an anomaly in this part of Malibu. A silver screen-worthy concept emerged, one with modernism as its protagonist. ‘We were like, what if it’s 007 at the beach? What if Lina Bo Bardi, her Brazilian modernist friends and a Bond girl could all walk in and have a cocktail?’ the designer remembers. ‘We really treated it as a Brazilian pavilion in Malibu.’

Fortunately, the structures required zero spatial rejiggering, leaving Shamshiri and her team to focus on infusing the spaces with drama. For inspiration, they researched Bo Bardi’s oeuvre – which encompasses some of Brazil’s most renowned modernist buildings – and watched back-to-back Bond films.

For the main residence, which contained the kitchen, living and entertaining spaces on the ground floor and the primary bedroom suite on the upper level, the designer wanted to incorporate ocean views everywhere, even when you weren’t facing it directly. So she installed dark mirrors on all of the surf-facing walls. ‘I love mirrors,’ Shamshiri says. ‘They can act as a portal that transports you to somewhere else. You’re just in a swirl of water in motion.’ Structural steel columns, meanwhile, were painted in a deep ocean blue hue for added effect.

To counter the gleaming surfaces, the design team wanted to create a cocooning sensation. Though the main house was largely open plan, the ceilings were low. Shamshiri and her team ran with it. ‘We accepted right away that the ceilings were low. So we created a sandwich of white ceilings above and white floors below, and then made everything else dark,’ she says.

The team opted for a palette of taupe, mocha and caramel. A wall backing the kitchen was painted black (‘It’s like a faded black T-shirt colour,’ Shamshiri says), while corridors and the primary bedroom were swaddled in a luxurious suede wallcovering (‘It came with a brush!’ she adds).

Entering the open-plan living space, with the ocean waves crashing in view, offers the chance to both take a load off and become the most glamorous version of yourself. The pièce de résistance here is a ‘DS-600’ leather sofa, a 1972 design by De Sede, which snakes across practically the entire length of the room, creating discrete seating nooks within its curves, populated with pieces by Bo Bardi contemporaries such as Joaquim Tenreiro. ‘I love that living room so much,’ Shamshiri says. ‘If you’re two people or you’re 50 people, it doesn’t make a difference.’

The clients love to entertain, so having a standout cocktail set-up was a must. The custom-made timber bar, whose undulating form echoes the shape of the sofa, comes clad in a row of olive-green tiles for a funky kick. You can almost imagine Bond, perched on a ‘Mexique’ stool by Charlotte Perriand, ordering his signature martini. ‘We wanted it to feel that you could be barefoot, in your bathing suit, making a drink, and it still feels elevated,’ Shamshiri explains.

Up a set of floating stairs is the primary bedroom suite. The mood here quietens down, but like the living area, the bedroom is anchored by a statement sofa, a pair of Patricia Urquiola ‘Tufty-Time’ sofas for B&B Italia arranged back-to-back. ‘We emphasised the horizontal, because the horizon is the greatest thing about being at the beach,’ the designer says. There’s also an office space for Bezdek and her husband, where, thanks to mirrors cleverly installed behind the shelves, the ocean is always nearby.

In fact, nature is always close at hand, thanks to lush grounds created by LA-based landscape designer Matthew Brown. Working alongside Shamshiri, he created a series of outdoor spaces including a firepit, a pool deck and, most striking of all, an oceanfront living room. ‘He has such a great way of softening and letting things feel very native in California, but overgrown,’ notes Shamshiri.

One of the guest suites contains a glamorous secret: a screening room where every surface, from the carpet and the ceiling to the Loro Piana fabric on the ‘Togo’ sofas, is drenched in the same crimson hue. ‘If this is Hollywood at the beach, what colour would you want to be drenched in? We were like, red,’ says Shamshiri. Here, Bezdek, her husband and their two young sons can pile in for movie nights. A bar hidden behind the red panelled walls is perfect for hosting friends. ‘Late at night, everyone always ends up in that room, even just to talk,’ Shamshiri adds.

Bezdek and her family are putting the house to good use, hosting impromptu dance parties in the living room and taking in the crash of waves on the terraces. ‘She can intuit someone’s inner vision, and then deliver something far beyond what anyone could have ever imagined,’ Bezdek says of Shamshiri. For the designer, that’s the sign of a job well done. ‘I love seeing how much everyone smiles,’ she says. ‘People just love this house.’

studioshamshiri.com

In the Fender guitar factory in Corona, California, beneath the gaze of the game-changing riff-masters (Jimi Hendrix, Phil Lynott, Jeff Beck) whose action-shot portraiture hangs high on the walls, the morning shift is hitting all the right notes – if those notes were the sound of whirring, sawing, sanding, buzzing, banging and clanking.

All this sweet industrial music is the sound of a hand-tooled production line, of multiple squads of dusty, visored, apron-wearing craftspeople building the 79-year-old company’s next generation of instruments: the American Professional Classic series.

‘People have this idea that when we mass-produce guitars, you throw a piece of wood in a giant machine and it spits out a guitar at the other end,’ says Allen Abbassi, director of Product Management at Fender Musical Instruments Corporation. ‘Nothing could be further from the truth. We do take advantage of modern technology with CNC machines that cut the bodies and necks initially. But there are over 150 hand processes that our operators perform on these guitars when they’re building them.’

After a protective goggle-sporting tour of the Corona facility – where the action is louder than many of the gigs I’ve been to – 52 miles east of Fender’s corporate HQ in Los Angeles, I can confirm that Stratocasters, Telecasters, Jazzmasters and Jaguars are indeed built, with care and precision, from scratch over some 22 days, starting with sawmilled hunks of ash, alder and rosewood. And also what Abbassi says is true: ‘The guys in the factory [are] artisans.’

Fender doesn’t just build guitars in the USA. The company’s factories in Mexico, China, Indonesia and India take care of more volume-focused models, including the Squier sub-brand, while Japan is another source of more specialist models. Corona, however, remains the motherlode, the most visible demonstration of the art and craft of modern guitar making.

‘The computerisation is really just to nail the geometry and the math,’ says Justin Norvell, president of Fender’s Americas division, talking of the iconic curves and contours of the company’s foundational rock’n’roll guitars, when we meet the following day in his Hollywood office. ‘Then hands blend everything and make everything work and get everything to fit – and wake it up as a product.

‘It’s not just the ingredients coming together,’ this tattooed C-suite rock stan continues. ‘It’s a system, and it’s the way that we put it together. If I make a meal next to a master chef out of the same recipe, mine’s not gonna be as good as theirs. So that love, that hand care – sanding off the edges of the fretboard that makes your hand fit like your best pair of jeans – is all-important to what makes these instruments iconic.’

With this new range, that iconography continues. The American Professional Classic series is ‘kind of a little brother to the American Professional series’, explains Abbassi. He’s standing, cradling one of the box-fresh new instruments, shiny racks of others behind him, in a demonstration space outside a Fender HQ meeting room labelled ‘Johnny Marr’ (one of the company’s ambassadors).

‘The “Classic” part is that all these guitars have a vintage vibe to them. In the 1950s and 1960s, Fender used very specific parts and styles of pick-ups. All these guitars represent that very well – they have vintage-style bridges and tuners. So they have this really beautiful, bell-like, chime-y sound that Fender’s known for,’ he says, pealing out a chord. ‘All the instruments are very personal,’ Abbassi adds. ‘They can be used for virtually any kind of music, from rock to funk to blues to punk.’

And they’re ready to rock. For all their design studio beauty, with a (relatively) accessible starting price-point of $1,499.99/£1,499 (€1,799, AUD2,599, ¥242,000), ‘these are road-worthy, ready-for-the-stage guitars that you could grab right off the hook [in] a store and go right to a gig and play’.

That vintage DNA is equally represented in the new series’ look. The colourways are also heritage: in the mid-20th century, Fender ‘borrowed’ from American car companies, spraying exactly the same lacquer paint on their guitars. ‘Lake Placid Blue Metallic was probably on some old Ford,’ says Abbassi. ‘Firemist Gold, Sherwood Green Metallic – these are all colours from the 1950s and 1960s.’

To put a contemporary spin on these heritage hues (which also include Dakota Red, Butterscotch Blonde and what Abbassi accurately describes as ‘the most ubiquitous and fan-favourite Fender colour of all time’, 3-Colour Sunburst), Fender has, paradoxically, found something ‘new and exciting’ by fading some of them, just as those old automobile lacquer paints would have faded.

The team researched washed-out, 70-year-old guitars online and at storied dealers such as Norman’s Rare Guitars in Tarzana, California. Then they chose the hues they wanted, finessing those with paint company TCP, with ‘samples flying back and forth’ (‘make it five per cent darker’); it sometimes taking ‘eight to ten versions’ to arrive at the right shade.

‘So they have almost a patina to them. For instance, this [Stratocaster] HSS strap here,’ continues Abbassi, pointing to another instrument, ‘is a Faded Black. It’s almost like a beautiful, blue-hued charcoal.’

‘Or an old T-shirt,’ chimes in Joey Brasler, VP of Product Management, with a grin. ‘That’s what it’s supposed to be.’ Explaining further, he says: ‘Justin’s the one that came up with the faded black. He ran to his office and came back with – literally – an old T-shirt. So we took pictures of it…’

‘I have a vintage black Clash T-shirt that I bought in Tokyo,’ says Norvell, sat at his desk in front of a Shepard Fairey stencil rendering of Joe Strummer, another previous Fender collaborator. ‘It’s the idea that a brand-new black T-shirt isn’t the same as a faded, worn one. It’s that aesthetic [that speaks to the fact that] so many of our instruments are heirlooms. They live for decades. People are still playing ones from the 1950s. A lot of your favourite artists are still playing the guitar they had forever. How do you imbue the age into something, but without necessarily really beating it up? So it was the idea of ageing these vintage colours… How can we reinterpret them… in a new way that is still aesthetically comfortable?’

All that vintaging? It’s about evoking serious use and serious love. These are not museum pieces, or art pieces. They’re certainly artful, but of fundamental importance is the guitars having both utility and a baked-in, respectful feel of heritage. As Norvell puts it: ‘The history of Fender is littered with cultural moments that are the soundtrack of people’s lives – whether that’s Buddy Holly on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Beatles on the [Savile Row] rooftop, [The Clash’s] London Calling, or Hendrix playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock or lighting his guitar on fire [at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967].

‘This culture map of music is inexorably linked to Fender,’ the exec continues. ‘So harkening to the past in that aesthetic way makes a lot of sense – and puts you more in touch with that past. Things that are classic or vintage, we don’t view as necessarily just old. They’re the icons that are timeless, not just timely.’

That timeliness is working in other ways, too. After years when guitar music – whether hard rock, indie or pop-leaning – has felt moribund and, frankly, unfashionable, there’s a resurgence afoot.

That’s embodied in younger British artists such as this week’s Mercury Music Prize winner Sam (no relation) Fender and The Last Dinner Party, and in insurgent American acts such as Geese or Turnstile, the latter the Baltimore hardcore outfit who are fronting the American Pro Classic campaign. It’s embodied, too, in the widening appeal, outside the US, of country music – a sound that’s embodied by the Telecaster.

‘Country’s been huge,’ acknowledges Norvell, adding that that’s certainly been good for FMIC business. But he also cites ‘pop artists choosing to grab guitars, like Olivia Rodrigo’, plus artists who are ‘bubbling up – you can feel that there’s a groundswell occurring. There are small things, too – the shoegaze revival, nu-metal revival – [where] you can feel the guitar tide level is coming up. But also,’ he adds with a defiant, true-believer flourish, ‘it never went away.’

And of course, this is also the year of the world-wowing Oasis comeback tour. Post-Live ’25, does this music obsessive – who is, naturally, himself a guitarist, his own cherished instruments propped against the wall in his office – think we’ll see a generational bounce of new players? He nods.

‘[With] all of these bands that have dusted it off and come back out, the Gen X-ers are bringing the kids,’ Norvell says – an observable fact to which anyone who witnessed the enraptured, all-ages audiences at this summer’s Oasis shows around the world can attest. ‘But the kids have grown up on this stuff, too. And are inspired by it. It’s definitely something we’re hopeful of – and it feels like it’s happening. You can sense that the guitar is entering another cycle of relevance and coolness.’

The Fender American Professional Classic Series is available globally now. For more information, please visit Fender.com, @Fender

Commune Design, the Los Angeles-based design studio, has unveiled a psychedelia-inspired collection of hand-knotted wool and silk rugs for contemporary rug company Christopher Farr. The collection boasts warm and inviting tones, with floral patterns interpreted through the lens of 1960s and 1970s Northern California.

Commune Design’s ‘Psychedelic’ collection for Christopher Farr

Three rug patterns, ‘Poppies’, ‘Weed’ and ‘Mushroom’ offer an alternative interpretation of classic Persian and European designs, yet the overall tone dances between old and new. Instead of a classic William Morris ivy border, cannabis garlands wrap rug edges. A gemstone palette of hues adopts the colour saturation typical of silk-screen Fillmore concert posters. And huge, scattered technicolour poppies evoke the work of a Jean-Michel Frank, nodding to the French designer’s 'luxe pauvre' (poor luxury) aesthetic.

The entire collection is rooted in a Northern California aesthetic, Commune Design having strong ties to the area. The designers took aesthetic cues from the region's arts and crafts traditions as well as its natural scenery, which includes the Sierra Nevada and redwood forests.

The design studio felt it fitting to shoot the ‘Psychedelic’ collection in late artist JB Blunk’s hand-built home. Reflecting an avant-garde, free-thinking approach to construction, the Blunk House encapsulates materiality, texture and colour; ‘[It's] everything we aim these rugs to be’, say the designers.

Commune Design's work matches the ethos of Christopher Farr; the artist and designer started his eponymous brand in 1988, with a mission to unite heritage textile craftsmanship with contemporary design.

If there’s one thing that Wallpaper* does well, it’s houses – spotlighting architecturally arresting gems from around the globe and spanning the spectrum of modern design. Our inboxes are overflowing with news of the world’s most boundary-pushing architectural projects, and we strive to bring you the very best.

To ensure you don’t miss a thing – and to showcase the scope of residential architecture today – we’ve launched a new monthly series: The Architecture Edit. Each instalment will highlight our favourite houses of the month: buildings that demonstrate creative planning, innovative methods and, of course, aesthetic excellence.

A Neutra landmark

Perched in the Pacific Palisades, this landmark of Californian modernism went on the market in September. It was designed by Richard Neutra in 1948 for Arts & Architecture magazine’s Case Study Houses programme – an experimental post-war housing initiative. Neutra’s only contribution to the series embodies midcentury ideals with natural materials like birchwood and mahogany, and encompasses forward-thinking features including a prefabricated utility core for plumbing and heating. The original owners lived here for over five decades, commissioning additions such as a guest house, but the property retains its original finishes, integrated glazing and indoor-outdoor flow. Located near Will Rogers Beach and the Eames Foundation, Case Study House #20 presents a rare opportunity to own an authentic piece of Neutra’s legacy and California’s architectural history.

A midcentury gem

The Norton House by Buff, Straub & Hensman – key figures in Southern California’s postwar residential boom – has also come on the market. Built in a wooded gully in Pasadena in 1954, the house exemplifies the era’s lightweight, nature-integrated architecture: it features terraces, decks and bridges suspended over a central stream, while a post-and-beam Douglas fir structure enables open-plan living. Finally, large glass panels flood the space with light and frame woodland views. Still-present original details include cork flooring, built-in seating, and a concrete block fireplace that separates living spaces. While the kitchen has been updated, the home retains its authentic midcentury character.

A cottage transformation

The Black and Stone project by London-based Mallett reimagines a derelict 1930s farmer’s cottage in Perthshire, combining heritage conservation with contemporary design. Rather than demolish, the team restored the stone shell before inserting a new timber-framed structure inspired by Norwegian hytter (cabins). The dark-stained larch exterior contrasts with the pale original stone, while salvaged material has been repurposed – most notably in a kitchen feature wall – and existing window openings realigned to frame key views. The former three-room cottage has been transformed into a four-bedroom family home, blending rugged Scottish charm with modern architectural sensibilities.

A clifftop retreat

Casa Piscina del Cielo, a dramatic coastal retreat by Zozaya Arquitectos, is perched high above the Pacific near Zihuatanejo. The private residence includes two bedrooms, a guest wing, and multiple indoor-outdoor living zones – from a cinema and gym to breezy lounges. The showstopper is a 27m-long pool that extends over the cliff edge, with a transparent floor panel giving swimmers the surreal experience of floating above the ocean. The home is carved into native rock, with a palapa-thatched roof and lush landscaping. Inside, the open-plan layout connects directly to the pool terrace, offering sweeping sea views and a profound sense of place.

A Le Corbusier icon

Though it was snapped up quickly, a duplex apartment in Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille recently hit the market – offering a rare glimpse inside one of the 20th century’s most important Brutalist buildings, now a Unesco World Heritage site (Wallpaper* was also recently invited to meet residents in their homes). Completed between 1947 and 1952, the building is based on Le Corbusier’s 'modulor' system – a scale of proportions derived from the human body and the golden ratio. This 100 sq m, two-bedroom unit spans two levels, with an open-plan living and dining space illuminated by a glazed façade. The current owners have embraced Le Corbusier’s signature palette, using primary-coloured panels on walls and doors.

A concrete sanctuary

Stealth House by Apollo Architects is an enigmatic residence in Tokyo defined by its monolithic concrete exterior – which conceals a surprisingly lush and luxurious retreat. Designed with privacy and security in mind, the home features an expansive infinity pool and terrace that flow from the main living area. Inside, the design embraces Japanese minimalism with airy volumes and refined materials. A built-in garage accommodates eight cars, with a dedicated car lounge that doubles as a gallery, while the basement is home to a gym, golf room and karaoke lounge, all lit by a sunken courtyard.

A coastal monolith

Designed by McLean Quinlan, Bay House is a robust and elegant modern home nestled into the North Devon coastline. Curving gently along the site’s natural contours, the structure blends into its landscape with a resilient, monolithic presence. Clad in Dorset Purbeck stone, the 550 sq m residence unfolds over three levels, with expansive windows and balconies framing views of sea and farmland. The design prioritises energy efficiency, featuring high-performance insulation, airtight construction, a ground source heat pump, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and photovoltaic solar panels. The result is a rugged yet refined residence, blending environmental consciousness with contemporary design.

Richard Neutra’s legacy is scattered across California, a touchstone for our understanding and definition of mid-century design. After a short career in Europe, Austrian-American architect arrived in Southern California in the early 1920s and almost immediately made an impression with the Lovell Beach House (1925) and Lovell Health House (1929), still two of the most iconic of all inter-war modernist houses.

Now you can own a key part of the architect’s oeuvre, a project that dovetails the work of émigré European modernists with the progressive and idealist American strain of residential design that emerged after the war.

This is 219 Chautauqua Blvd, better known as Case Study House #20. Neutra’s only entry into this seminal series of experimental residences, House #20 is located in the Pacific Palisades, one of 25 built as a result of Arts & Architecture magazine’s pioneering experimental programme, helmed by editor John Entenza.

Originally designed for the young dentist Dr Stuart Bailey and his wife June, the project was published in Arts & Architecture in 1947 and completed the following year. The Bailey family lived in the house for over 50 years and engaged Neutra to complete two additions to the house in 1950 and 1958, including the addition of a free-standing guest house.

After Dr Bailey sold the house at the turn of the century, it was acquired by the late architecture fan and TV producer Sam Simon, one of the co-developers of The Simpsons. Simon oversaw a substantial restoration, helmed by prominent local studio Marmol Radziner.

A second house was also built on the plot, creating a 1.5-acre compound. Following Simon’s death in 2015 house was bought by the owners of Australian active-wear brand Lorna Jane, and another round of updates followed, again courtesy of Marmol Radziner. After this period of ownership the compound was split in two.

The Bailey House is now available again, courtesy of realtors Compass. Offered fully furnished, the house sits on a prime lot above Will Rogers Beach State Park and practically adjoining the Eames Foundation. At just 1,849 square feet it’s modest by local standards.

Originally containing just two bedrooms, Neutra designed the house ‘to serve young parents who find they can afford just that much, although their land is large enough to add later when the evolution of their lives may require it,’ which is exactly what happened.

From the classic Californian arrangement of an entrance alongside a carport, the house immediately opens up into spacious living quarters, with sliding glass doors leading on to a patio. As originally built there were sea views to be had, but vegetation and other building gives the garden a more insular, enclosed feel.

Neutra also designed the house to incorporate a ‘pre-fabricated utility core,’ containing all plumbing and heating in a ready-made package. This places the kitchen and bathrooms in the heart of the house.

Neutra noted that the use of natural wood ‘would reduce later redecorating costs’, but today’s buyer will treat the expanse of blond birchwood and Costa Rican mahogany as definite plus points, not cost-saving measures. A built-in banquette in the living room, integral wardrobes and cupboards throughout and the careful integration of high and low-level windows into the bedrooms and kitchen infuse the house with light at all times.

More self-contained and insular than some of the other houses in the A&A series, House #20 is a rare opportunity to own a legendary part of California’s modernist legacy, as well as a work by one of the era’s most accomplished architects.

Neutra’s influence continues to be felt across all facets of contemporary house design, right down to the numbers on the door. Other key Neutra projects in the area include LA's Strathmore Apartments, the VDL House, the Josef Kun House #1 and the recently refurbished Lord House.

Case Study House #20, Richard Neutra, $10,500,000, More details at Compass.com

Back in 1999, the UK controversially lost a portion of William Morris’ archive when the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in California won the bid to acquire it. Measures exist to prevent such cultural exports – for example, the UK government recently managed to keep an iconic Barbara Hepworth sculpture in the country, allowing institutions to raise the funds to purchase it. In 1999, however, no such intervention occurred, and the Morris materials went to the US.

Now, Morris & Co. – the original company founded by Morris, today part of the Sanderson Design Group, a luxury interior furnishings brand – is partnering with The Huntington to present The Unfinished Works, a new collection of 26 designs derived from previously incomplete sketches by Morris and his creative director, John Henry Dearle.

The collaboration began when The Huntington found over 50 unfinished works in its archive. These pieces, spanning a variety of mediums including fabrics, wallpapers, tiles and stained glass, existed in varying stages of completion. Their discovery sparked the idea for Morris & Co. to bring these dormant designs to life.

The Unfinished Works features a range of designs – from wallpapers and borders to fabrics, weaves and embroideries. The colour palette is drawn directly from Morris & Co.’s historical logbooks, ensuring authentic pigmentation and tonal accuracy.

Produced in the Morris & Co. studio in Chiswick, London, and manufactured at the brand’s historic UK factories in Loughborough and Lancaster, the collection is not just about recreating the past. It also adds a contemporary layer to the work, in the pioneering spirit of Morris himself. The creative team used Morris and Dearle’s notes and references as both blueprint and inspiration – interpreting them through a contemporary lens. This project bridges both time and geography – uniting the present-day Morris & Co. with its 19th-century origins, and reconnecting the UK-based company with the archive that had once seemed lost.

‘As artists, we’ve asked ourselves not what we should do, but what we can do to preserve, refine and complete these exquisite pieces of archival art, making them relevant not only to today but also to the future as part of art history,’ says lead designer Jess Clayworth. ‘The “Co.” in Morris & Co. is alive and well in The Unfinished Works.’

William Morris (1834-896) was a towering figure of the nineteenth century – a political theorist, publisher, environmental campaigner, poet and, of course, designer. He founded Morris & Co. in 1861, which grew into a thriving Arts & Crafts business. In reawakening its unfinished works, the brand reconnects the threads of a remarkable legacy in a true testament to the enduring relevance of Morris’s vision.

The collection will be available through Morris & Co.'s website and selected retailers

Desert architecture is an architecture born out of harsh, unforgiving environments, where buildings need to contend with intense heat and sunlight and low humidity and water supply. They adapt using passive design techniques: materials like stone absorb and release heat slowly, for example, while overhangs can provide shade.

California's indigenous and vernacular buildings were climate-responsive from the start, with Spanish and Mission influences developing this tradition. A defining wave came during the midcentury modern movement, however; now, when people think about architecture in this part of the world, they tend to think about California modernism.

California modernism blends the simplicity, clean lines and minimal ornamentation of modernism with an indoor-outdoor lifestyle suited to the state's hot temperatures and natural beauty. The epicentre of the movement was Palm Springs, which became a playground for architectural experimentation. The buildings that popped up here during the midcentury were rooted in both the city's desert setting and resort lifestyle, as well as the fashions of the Hollywood elites and wealthy retirees who lived here.

Today, desert architecture in California continues to combine minimalism with climate-responsiveness, creating buildings that embrace nature both visually and functionally.

Kaufmann House, Palm Springs

Architect: Richard Neutra (1946)

Designed by Richard Neutra in 1946 for Edgar J Kaufmann Sr (who also commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater), the Kaufmann House is a striking example of modernist architecture, while also incorporating desert pragmatism. Designed in the International Style (the dominant force in modern architecture throughout the midcentury), the home features geometric forms, open layouts and a connection to its environment via materials like steel, glass, concrete and Utah buff sandstone, as well as landscaping with native boulders, cacti and desert flora. Deep overhangs provide shade, while the U-shaped floor plan wraps around a central courtyard, harbouring a cooler microclimate.

Frey House II, Palm Springs

Architect: Albert Frey (1964)

Albert Frey selected the site of Frey House II – on the slopes of the San Jacinto mountains – specifically for its orientation before spending a year considering sun exposure to determine the optimal placement of components. The minimalist desert retreat seems to emerge organically from the mountainside (it was, at the time of completion, the highest residential structure in Palm Springs), and a massive boulder juts into the living room, both dividing the space and grounding it in the landscape. Elsewhere, Frey used colour to connect to the environment: turquoise panels mimic cholla cacti and yellow curtains recall desert brittlebush.

The Integratron, Landers

Designer: George Van Tassel (late 1950s)

One of California’s most unusual pieces of desert architecture, The Integratron was designed in the late 1950s by ‘ufologist’ George Van Tassel, inspired by alleged instructions from extraterrestrial beings. This architectural oddity is a wooden dome built without nails or metal fasteners, instead using traditional wooden joinery, which helps regulate internal temperatures by reducing thermal conductivity. It also produces remarkable acoustics, making the structure ideal for the sound baths it is known for today. The Integration’s minimal footprint and off-grid location also reflect a low-impact approach suitable for a desert ecosystem.

Invisible House, Joshua Tree

Designer and architect: Chris Hanley and Tomas Osinski

Designed by Tomas Osinski in collaboration with film producer Chris Hanley (of American Psycho and The Virgin Suicides), the Invisible House, which is available to rent, is clad entirely in mirrored glass, causing it to ‘disappear’ into the Joshua Tree desert. While strikingly modern in appearance, the building observes many of the same design principles of traditional desert architecture: the 225ft structure is elevated off the ground, minimising environmental disruption, and its mirrored façade reflects sunlight, reducing solar heat gain.

Black Desert House, Yucca Valley

Architect: Oller & Pejic Architecture (2012)

The Black Desert House in Yucca Valley (also available for stays) is distinctive for its obsidian exterior – conceived by Oller & Pejic to be 'like a shadow' – constructed from dark cement panels, quartz aggregate and blackened steel. The property is a visual resting point in the arid Yucca Valley; inside, the design deliberately reduces visual distraction from within, focusing attention on the landscape. While its colour might seem ill-suited for the desert, the materials used in the Black Desert House are durable and heat-tolerant, and paired with cooling measures such as deep overhangs and strategic openings.

Edris House, Palm Springs

Architect: E. Stewart Williams (1954)

Unlike the more flamboyant homes of California modernism – which became popular among Hollywood clientele around the mid-century – the Edris House is understated and honest in its materials and intention. Situated on a rocky knoll in Palm Springs, the structure uses locally-sourced stone and wood and floor-to-ceiling glass to blend into the rocky landscape. Indeed, E Stewart Williams wanted the home to seem like it 'grew out of the ground rather than falling out of the sky'. A flat roof with wide overhangs protects interior spaces from the sun, while the layout supports cross-ventilation.

Elrod House, Palm Springs

Architect: John Lautner (1968)

Unlike Edris House, Elrod House is a brillitant example of the cinematic drama that could come out of California modernism. Perched on a ridge in Palm Springs, the most striking feature of John Lautner’s building is its massive domed roof. But the structure fuses this drama with nature: the roof is sculpturally segmented with cutaways that allow light and ventilation to flood the interior, while curved, floor-to-ceiling sliding glass walls dissolve the boundary between indoors and out. Finally, outdoor elements such as giant boulders are brought into the living space, anchoring the structure in the landscape.

This near-perfect example of an iconic Eichler home has gone on sale in California. Designed by Claude Oakland, one of the famous developer’s principal architects, this 1964 house has only had two sets of owners. The first, who bought the house when it was new, stayed there for 56 years, ensuring key features were preserved, including the original kitchen and bathrooms.

Explore this Eichler home, and its progressive Californian developer's legacy

The second owners, who are now selling the house through realtor and Eichler specialist Dara Buzzard, have spent five years and around $300,000 updating the house with a new pool and pergola, discreet kitchen appliance updates, and a thorough renovation of the roof, electrics and finishes.

The end result sparkles just like it must have done back in the mid-1960s, when it was one of nearly 70 houses built by developer Joseph Eichler in the Parkwood Estates complex in Concord. The subdivision accounts for a large chunk of the 179 houses in the town, which lies about 20km north-east of the city of Oakland.

3772 Gainsborough Drive is a fine example of a late-period Eichler. Claude Oakland’s low-lying, open-plan structure epitomises Joseph Eichler’s values of providing contemporary design for all. The developer is perhaps the most successful purveyor of modest midcentury modernist design, building some 11,000 houses across California between 1949 and 1966 (he died in 1974). Said to have been inspired by a short spell renting a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house, Eichler switched careers from a butter and egg salesman to become a specialist developer.

The Californian interpretation of modernism remains one of the most seductive of all contemporary architectural styles, a blend of clean lines, clear glass, bright sunshine and impeccable glamour. While the era’s most high-flying architects were busy building glass, steel and wood palaces for the stars, Eichler took a much more democratic approach, building houses that were modest in scale and price (3772 Gainsborough Drive is just under 2,000 sq ft).

The developer made silk purses for the sow's ear that was suburban sprawl. Only a tiny proportion of homeowners could go down the road inspired by the Case Study Houses (a series of experimental homes that includes the recently reopened Eames House), and in any case, suburbs were flat, gridded networks of identikit streets, not leafy canyons with staggering city views.

Eichler's team worked with what they had, and what they had was innately superior to the landscape of cookie cutter bungalows and picket fences. The company’s output has been highly sought after ever since, with major developments in Marin County, Sacramento, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Mountain View, as well as Thousand Oaks and Palm Springs to the south.

The rise in Eichler worship coincided with Northern California’s transformation into the intellectual cradle of world-dominating technology companies; one could argue that there’s a certain parity between the tech industry’s fascination with all forms of manufactured utopia and Eichler’s elegant, airy austerity. His roster of architects included some of the big names of the era, such as Ray Kappe, A. Quincy Jones, Frederick Emmons and Raphael Soriano. The house plans were almost infinitely variable depending on site, buyer and specification.

Claude Oakland’s design for 3772 Gainsborough Drive is an example of the CC-174R Model, of post-and-beam construction with internal atrium and flowing inside-outside spaces. Glazing is floor-to-ceiling throughout, with wooden ceilings and skylights. The generous original plan included bespoke kitchen and closets and a laundry room.

Located in Parkwood Estates in close proximity to numerous other Eichler designs, the current owners seized on the opportunity to acquire the property at the turn of the decade. ‘My father was an architect,’ they told the realtor. ‘He had the incredible opportunity to work with Walter Gropius at The Architects Collaborative (TAC) in Cambridge, MA.

'Growing up surrounded by that legacy, I developed a close connection to the world of architecture early on. Coincidentally, we both began our academic journeys in architecture school before pivoting to design, but the love for the built environment never left us.’

Acquiring 3772 Gainsborough Drive was the culmination of a long obsession. ‘The home was untouched – original owner, original everything,’ they recalled. ‘It needed a lot of work, and to most people, it looked like a risky investment. Friends and family thought we were crazy for paying what we did for a house in that condition. But we saw the potential. We believed in the bones, the history, and the vision.’

Restoration included period-correct vinyl flooring and retaining the original mahogany panelling, as well as updating the services and roof. Meticulously presented for sale, it recalls the way Eichler and his team dressed their show homes back in the 1950s and 1960s, with furniture by the Eameses and Harry Bertoia demonstrating how best to use the open-plan spaces.

It’s no small irony that although the Eichler house transcended the suburban archetype, it still legitimised the car-first, low-density neighbourhood. And although these distinct houses provide idiosyncrasy and individuality, heritage and conservation restrictions are becoming ever stricter, thanks to high-profile teardowns and unsympathetic alterations.

Nevertheless, the lure of these icons of mass market modernism is still strong, as evidenced by the long-running Eichler Network, which provides community, information and support on the surviving houses.

For the owners of 3772 Gainsborough Drive, who are relocating to be closer to family, the benefits of the design have always outweighed the negatives. ‘Honestly, there is NO bad angle in this home. No matter where you are standing or where you are looking from, it is always stunning,’ they told the realtor. ‘We wake up to soft morning light casting gentle shapes on the walls, and as the day progresses, the shadows shift and dance through the house. The glass brings in silhouettes of leaves and branches, creating ever-changing patterns that feel almost meditative.’

3772 Gainsborough Drive is being sold by Dara Buzzard, priced at $1,375,000,

EichlerNetwork.com

This is the latest instalment of The Inside Story, Wallpaper’s series spotlighting intriguing, innovative and industry-leading interior design.

Profiling a designer’s home is always a treat, offering an unfiltered glimpse into their personal taste. So goes the story with Tamara Honey’s charming Montecito dwelling.

Known as the Quarry House, the property was originally built in the 1950s by pioneering female architect Lutah Maria Riggs. What began as a humble wooden cabin has since been transformed by Honey into a serene and soulful sanctuary. The whole property, from the pool and wraparound deck to the surrounding landscape, has been reimagined to align with her aesthetic, while still honouring the spirit of Riggs’ original vision.

The exterior, now clad in blackened cedar, nods to the traditional Japanese technique of ‘shou sugi ban’, a method of preserving wood through charring. Honey further embraced the home’s natural setting by incorporating original boulders into the decking, creating a sculptural ‘social stair’, the perfect perch for gatherings. Inside, the Quarry House marries Japandi restraint with Californian warmth. Natural materials like wood, stone and glass are paired with vintage pieces, sculptural objects and meaningful artwork.

The home is subtly informed by Montecito’s bohemian spirit, and is very much envisioned to be a retreat from city life. True to its name, the Quarry House is nestled within a former rock quarry on a one-acre hillside, situated between the Santa Barbara foothills and the Santa Ynez mountains, offering sweeping views of both peaks and ocean. Honey’s renovation takes full advantage of this setting by inviting the outdoors in. She opened up the interiors and added two striking glass volumes – one housing a new primary suite, the other a freestanding guesthouse. Though the main house measures just 1,800 sq ft, with an additional 550 sq ft in the guest quarters, it feels expansive, its boundaries softened by connection to the landscape.

For Honey, size has been no object in the creation of a deeply personal retreat that balances heritage and innovation, nature and design. The home reflects her eclectic language – soulful, playful and unexpected.

Transparency in all its forms plays a pivotal role in Terremoto’s ethos. The landscape architecture practice was founded in Los Angeles in 2013 by David Godshall and Alain Peauroi (who passed away this January – ‘the biggest thing that our studio has endured to date,’ Godshall says); but now, its team runs as a thriving collective and has a second base in San Francisco. Its openness about its values – ecological, philosophical, social, moral – makes it a powerful proposition in its field and defines both its methods and output.

Getting to know LA landscape architects Terremoto

‘It's important to our team to practice in ways that reflect these beliefs. For example, we have a stance on labour, in that we proactively acknowledge, credit and advocate for the individuals and crews who build our projects, and this public stance is almost non-existent in our industry. Speak up!’ says Godshall.

It was an early encounter with the book ‘City Form and Natural Process’ by Michael Hough, following a suggestion from his mother to look into landscape architecture, that led Godshall to his current career path. Blown away by the depth and importance of the book’s thesis, which examines ‘why wildlife in urban environments was mostly present in feral, wild or non-designed spaces,’ he decided to go into the profession and change that. ‘Why shouldn’t landscape be purposefully designed for wildlife too?’ he wondered.

Now, the studio has several projects on the go, including some that sit adjacent to architectural icons, of which California is not short of. It is ‘a fun philosophical territory to swim into,’ says Godshall. The team is currently working on Richard Neutra's Lovell Health House in Los Angeles, reconciling early Modernist architecture and philosophy with today’s push towards using mostly indigenous plants and local materials.

They have been reworking the planting around the Hollyhock House by Frank Lloyd Wright and just wrapped up phase two of a project at the Sea Ranch Lodge. He explains: ‘We quietly believe that historic architecture is perhaps best brought into its next era through revitalising the landscapes around them; architecture is inescapably a more fixed medium, whereas in the landscape things live and die and thrive and age, and we're thus honoured to bring these buildings into their next, more ecologically astute eras.’

This also aligns with the studio’s belief that gardens can never quite be deemed ‘finished’. Landscape is in a constant process of change: growth, death, life and maintenance. It’s all ultimately about stewardship, a challenge which Terremoto are keen to highlight and take on. ‘Our best projects, we get to tinker on forever,’ Godshall adds. Embracing the land and understanding this process is important in carving a sustainable path to the future, he explains. ‘We believe that America urgently needs an ecological revolution, and to do so we're going to need to endow the citizenry of our country with the bravery, skills and ecological literacy they will need to collectively will this revolution into existence.’

At the northern edge of the San Jacinto Mountains in Palm Springs, California, sits a home so seamlessly embedded in the rocky desert terrain, that Mother Nature herself could have created it. Designed by architect Jill Lewis, the low-slung, two-level building, called the Wabi Sabi House, sits in stillness like a natural extension of the otherworldly, boulder-laden landscape.

In designing the building, Lewis, who splits her time between Palm Springs and San Francisco, adhered to the main principles of organic architecture, which endeavour to create harmony between the home and its natural surroundings.

'It’s this kind of insane moonscape,' Lewis explains about the region and, in particular, the half-acre lot nestled against the Desert Palisades neighbourhood’s picturesque backdrop. 'This particular site backs up to boomerang-shaped berm, so we situated the house on the front edge to create this really private backyard space with views of the mountain above it.'

A thoughtful take on desert modernism, the expansive 6,500-square-foot, two-level home (itself conceived in the shape of a boomerang) rests on a three-part concrete foundation, with the dwelling stretched between each board-formed concrete pedestal and hovering like a bridge over naturally occurring arroyos flowing beneath. An open floor plan and generous floor-to-ceiling windows offer incomparable 360-degree vistas.

'There’s a view of Palm Springs in one direction, the windmills in another and incredible [unobstructed] views of both the Santa Jacinto and Santa Rosa Mountains,' Lewis adds.

The structure is clad in blackened tongue-and-groove cypress siding, with painted steel fascia and glass guardrails. Inside, large-format porcelain and concrete floors create a complimentary dialog with the natural stone found around the property.

'The way I work, and my design values are really about contextual sensitivity and an honest expression of materials,' Lewis shares. 'Everything feels effortless, inevitable and natural, and you really feel like you can connect with the site.'

Some walls and custom cabinetry have been faced with light, natural oak, while other walls are generously clad with honed Portuguese limestone that practically begs to be touched. The three-quarter-inch tongue and groove hemlock ceilings extend to the outdoor soffits providing a further connection between the interior and exterior spaces.

And then there’s the Japanese-inspired gardens, brought to life by project collaborator John Hreno, the associate principal of landscape architecture firm Hoerr Schaudt.

'As designers, we want to feel the space, the energy and the chi,' explains Hreno who studied the site in-depth. 'I wanted to turn the landscape into a living experience and something that seems like it was always there, and that the house was built around it.'

Hreno’s overarching goal was to maintain and restore the native ecosystems with respect to the land. The landscape's regenerative design features native plants like yellow brittlebushes, agave, and Mexican palo verde, as well as locally-sourced boulders and stones and a rainwater collection system for the property’s plant and wildlife

'I wanted to reintroduce the natural beauty of the site, and not just from the peripheral with borrowed landscape,' Hreno says.

To that end, Hreno enveloped the home with five distinct planting regions that take advantage of their individual positioning while paying homage to the five elements – wood, fire, earth, metal and water – that are associated with seasons, directions and emotions. Agaves representing exuberant splashes of water are planted in one section while circular opuntia cacti mimic the look of coins as a nod to prosperity in another, and plants such as Encelia nurture fire through their vibrant colours.

'The property is a kind of choreography of experiences and I wanted it to be an example for what the possibilities are beyond just stereotypical crunchy native landscapes,' Hreno explains.

'I think the best work we’re seeing in the desert is not about replicating the past, it’s about learning from it and applying the core principals in a new way,' says Lewis, noting the nearby historic homes designed by legendary architects like Donald Wexler, Albert Frey and Richard Neutra.

But the most significant lesson she and Hreno have learned is from nature personified: 'The desert is very unforgiving,' she says. 'It’s a beautiful collaborator, but you can’t force your will on it. You have to listen and take it seriously.'

Architects' own homes often have a bigger purpose. The VDL overlooking the Silver Lake Reservoir was more than just shelter to Richard Neutra, for instance, as were Eileen Gray's Villa E-1027 French Riviera retreat and Albert Frey's hillside dwelling hovering above the Coachella Valley. The house that seminal Palm Springs modernist architecture master Donald Wexler designed in 1954 navigated a certain tension, as both an aspirational design laboratory and a functional family home, which later fell into disrepair. It would take a dedicated owner half a century later to fully realise the architect's creative intention.

Wexler's wood frame post-and-beam structure was a prototypical vehicle to explore engineering and design concepts later articulated in his experimental steel frame prefabricated homes with architect Richard Harrison in the early 1960s, as well as in his more luxurious commissions, such as the Dinah Shore estate. First and foremost, however, it was where Wexler and his wife Marilynn moved during her first pregnancy in 1955, and then raised their three children.

Construction took four months, and the modest means of a young architect in the early stages of his career largely dictated the materials. Donald and Marilynn's focus here was nurturing their domestic life and expanding the original 1,450-square-foot envelope when needed, while allowing the house's program to engage in evolving design conversations of the day.

Since purchasing the property in 2007, Daniel Patrick Giles, a Palm Springs- and Los Angeles-based fashion and beauty industry veteran, who in 2022 launched Perfumehead fragrances and was named to the Wallpaper* USA 400 in 2024, has examined and restored the potential of Wexler's ideals. The architecture can now speak for itself and honour its history.

Giles became smitten with Palm Springs architecture about two decades ago when a photo shoot for his erstwhile employer, Canadian luxury department store Holt Renfrew, brought him to Neutra's 1946 landmark Kaufmann House. After the Toronto native began visiting the desert regularly from his then-home base of San Francisco, a basic internet search for 'Palm Springs modern home for sale' led him to one of Donald Wexler's steel frame works; even if that particular property wasn't for sale at the time, the architect was put on his radar. Eventually, a realtor showed him the 1955 Wexler family compound that was languishing on the market.

'The integrity of the house wasn't kept up. But when I walked into it, I could visualize the structure of it, and there seemed to be a nice flow,' Giles recalls. The meticulous restoration interventions that followed were based on conversations with Wexler, who passed away in 2015, as well as input from Wexler protege Lance O'Donnell of o2 Architecture. (The property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is designated as a Palm Springs Class 1 Historic Resource.)

Giles' specific experience of speaking with Wexler about the home was somewhat surprising. In this particular situation, 'I wasn't really dealing with an architect. I was dealing with a father, a husband, who lived there,' Giles tells Wallpaper*. Wexler's technical memories were more strongly tied to his other projects, not his own residence. But patience proved rewarding.

After 'unpacking the emotion, it was about the purity of the house.' Wexler revealed that a budget larger than his $15,000 GI Bill loan would have led to different choices. So, Giles replaced the hodgepodge of concrete, linoleum tiles and carpeting with consistent terrazzo flooring throughout, for instance. The placement of the original can lights all stayed. The 1960 children's bedroom wing remained, while post-Wexler period additions were removed.

Giles could have ended his relationship with the home when he sold it in 2015. And yet the pull was too strong. When the opportunity presented itself six years later, he bought it back and thus began his next chapter at the Wexler House again with interior designer Darren Brown on board. Despite all their years considering every inch inside and out, 'it took a lot of experimenting to understand what works and what doesn't work,' Brown observes. 'This house looks best with less stuff. It truly is about the architecture, and about space and light.'

Brown points to 'shapes and forms, circles and cubes, black and white, light and reflection' as core guiding principles that helped determine the furniture selection. In other words, simplicity. During this phase of what might be described as under-decorating, Giles wanted to further 'neutralise' the house; he and Brown painstakingly developed a paint colour dubbed Wexler White to coat all the solid surfaces in a singular hue instead of the previously contrasting posts and beams.

This is a house of stories. In honour of its 70th anniversary, Giles and noted curator Brooke Hodge organised Growing Up Wexler, a site-specific installation on view during Palm Springs Modernism Week this past February featuring archival architectural documentation, family photos and memories from Glen, Gary, and Brian Wexler.

Giles' most recent love letter to the house is, appropriately, a perfume. Together with perfumer Constance Georges-Picot, Perfumehead has released the fragrance 1272,

'We looked at the elements around the house,' Giles recalls, and subsequently combined petitgrain lime, orange blossom, pink pepper, jasmine, verbena, sandalwood and other extracts to compose an olfactory homage to the house using Perfumehead's signature coltrait formulation, a cologne-extrait hybrid.

Much like how a scent evolves, the Wexler House will continue to be an unfolding prospect — even if the work seems to be complete for now. 'I think 2.0 is almost the best representation of the house,' Giles states. 'I feel extremely lucky not to have it once, but to have it twice.'

In 2020, Indianapolis-based Mali and Alan Bacon felt a sense of urgency. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, there was 'a sudden and almost haphazard effort' from art fairs and galleries to show artwork made by Black people.

The married couple, who have experience in the non-profit and for profit sector and art backgrounds themselves, thought, 'OK, it's great that it's finally happening, but the artists still need to be cared for and we need to protect them. We had been to Miami Art Basel and other fairs for years and we thought we could do this. We can do the artwork justice.'

Butter – their Indianapolis art fair where all works are by Black artists – was born from that energy. The fair is known for its policy of taking no commission from artists’ sales.

While the fair prepares to celebrate its fifth year in Indianapolis, this year, Los Angeles gets their first taste of Butter. From now until 17 August, Butter is open to the public at Context Projects. Butter Los Angeles includes 14 pieces from eight artists, half from Los Angeles, half from Indianapolis. The LA instalment is presented in collaboration with ArtLoudLA and Valence Studios and is free and open to the public.

In conversation with Mali and Alan Bacon, founders of Butter Art Fair

Wallpaper: What is Butter’s mission?

Mali Bacon: The mission of Butter is to centre the care and the economic viability of African diasporic artists. Here in Indianapolis, we reserve half of the exhibition space for Indiana based artists and then bring in artists from other markets.

Alan Bacon: Butter allows just a unique opportunity to challenge the dichotomy between value and worth. Black Lives Matter, of course, but what we produce is also in the throes of that narrative. Where there is recognised value, but the worth is one thing that Butter tries to meet headstrong.

W*: How did you decide to bring a version of the fair to Los Angeles?

MB: This event is a taste of Butter, it's an introduction to what could be possible in Los Angeles.

We had 11 Los Angeles based artists in Butter 2024 and our curator Nakeyta Moore is from LA and helped to broker and introduce the markets to each other. This year Jac Forbes is a curator for Butter in Indianapolis and is based in LA and Malibu.

LA is interested and curious about this no commission model. [LA is] thinking about what the future of art fairs is. Does Indianapolis have it? And I think LA is like, ‘Oh, no, we do too now.’

W*: Butter operates on a 100% model, with the fair taking no commission from the artist. Why is this important to you?

MB: We're not anti-gallery, we're just introducing another way where we're not building the fair off of taking any sales from the artist. That's just not one of the revenue streams.

A third of revenue comes from ticket sales despite being a more accessibly priced fair. Revenue also comes from the shop, and the bar, building out the experience around it and sponsorships. The private sector really comes together to support this and because they have access then to the artist, they are curating their hotels and their corporate offices with these Butter artists who are emerging and established.

AB: I think we had around $65,000 worth of art sold within that first year and around 3400 attendees. Fast forward four years and we are anticipating 12,000 individuals per year now and we've sold over $900,000 worth of art. Almost a million dollars going back to artists' hands and households.

W*: Why is the no commission model particularly important for the Black artists showing at the fair?

MB: To me, it’s a form of cultural reparations. We're talking about economic justice, we're talking about being able to pay back a culture that has offered so much to our everyday life, our quality of life.

When I think about cultural reparations, I think of empowerment, because the artists made this and this is what they're charging. That's what they want for it. Power at the end of the day is what we're offering back. We find ourselves as brokers to advocate on behalf of the artist versus on behalf of the fair or the institution or the gallery, which is the traditional model.

AB: Butter is about representation. This allows there to be a microphone to the voice of the artist that we depend on in very critical moments in history. I think we're in a critical moment right now as well. In traditional platforms and pathways, that’s not the case.

Butter is open to the public at Context Projects, 4435 1/2 W. Slauson Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90043 until 17 August 2025

If there’s one thing that we at Wallpaper* do well, it’s houses – spotlighting architecturally-arresting gems from around the globe and spanning the spectrum of modern design, to be precise. Our inboxes are overflowing with news of the world’s most boundary-pushing architectural projects, and we strive to bring you the very best.

To ensure you don’t miss a thing – and to showcase the scope of residential architecture today – we’re launching a new monthly series: The Architecture Edit. Each instalment will highlight our favourite houses of the month: buildings that demonstrate creative planning, innovative methods and, of course, aesthetic excellence.

Here are our standout houses for July.

A 1970s Japanese summer house

Architect Mayumi Miyawaki’s Fukumura Cottage, designed in 1974, posed a counterpoint to the dominant Japanese architecture of the time. Rejecting the techno-futurism of his peers, Miyawaki infused traditional ideas with geometric experimentation. This Nasu home resembles a concrete treehouse, with bold, primary forms and a raw material palette. Inside, interiors are minimalist – a compact living room, a tatami tea room, and an attic bedroom accessed by ladder. Recently, collectors Noboru and Yuka Tanaka restored Fukumura Cottage, preserving its architectural legacy while integrating it into a modern design compound that also includes a gallery and office.

A Victorian villa turned eco-home

Studio Bark transformed a neglected Victorian villa in Tunbridge Wells into a sustainable family home using its modular U-Build system – a flat-pack timber method for self-build construction. The retrofit restored original Victorian features while introducing sustainable systems like an air-source heat pump and MVHR (mechanical ventilation with heat recovery), reducing energy usage by 75 per cent, as well as adding a 50 m sq extension clad in timber and insulated with cork over wool, two bedrooms, and a kitchen-diner.

A Wyoming mountain sanctuary

This contemporary retreat was designed by CLB Architects as an off-grid escape for a New York family. Nestled on a 49-acre site with panoramic views of the Teton mountains, the home is anchored to the hillside, formatted to meet local height restrictions. Its materials echo its natural surroundings – Montana stone, cedar ceilings, walnut flooring and blackened steel – as does a muted colour palette. A high-performance envelope and geothermal systems ensure that the home treads lightly on the land it draws from.

A midcentury modern masterpiece in California

A mid-century home in Berkeley, designed in 1956 by Chinese-American architect Roger Lee, was updated by Mork-Ulnes Architects for its new owners. Retaining the original warm wood structure, the renovation focused on subtle edits – improving light flow, concealing utilities and updating finishes. The continuation of Lee’s vision was key, and can be felt in the addition of a rectilinear central volume and playful red tile bathrooms. The kitchen remains galley-style, and new furniture selections respect the home’s historical warmth.

A clifftop house in Crete

The Rethymno House by Gkotsis Serafimidou blends into its rugged Cretian surrounds through materials and form – think local stone, timber shutters, matte plaster interiors and a cement screed floor. Its clifftop architecture also responds to environmental challenges like strong winds by embedding itself into the slope and using strategic orientation, while native vegetation and framed views enhance the immersive connection to nature.

A revived Rudolph Schindler gem

Originally built in 1925 by modernist master Rudolph Schindler, the How House in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, was recently restored by Spencer Velasquez. Comprised of intersecting L-shaped volumes, the house features cantilevered rooms in poured concrete and redwood. Velasquez, with the help of interior designer Taska Cleveland, made sensitive updates, including new built-ins, brass lighting and concealed audio systems. The result is a living architectural relic that balances design history and daily life.

Stepping inside this Mar Vista house, architect Pablo Pérez Palacios hopes visitors can feel the sense of calm, intimacy, and continuity it was designed to exude. ‘The house doesn’t aim to stand out but to offer a subtle experience of light, texture, and proportion,’ says the founder of Mexican architecture firm PPAA. ‘As visitors move through the space, they encounter a rhythm of open and closed, curved and straight – a spatial sequence that invites pause and quiet attention.’

Explore this breezy Mar Vista house in sunny California

The residence is located in a laid-back, suburban area near the beach in Los Angeles, California. The building's facade explores geometry through curved and straight lines in a monolithic volume of exposed concrete. This interplay, mixed with an honest and raw materiality, makes for a dynamic narrative that hints at brutalist architecture.

‘The project is a response to the scale and informality of Mar Vista — a low-density neighborhood defined by quiet streets and open gardens. The design explores the idea of the house as a sequence of volumes and voids, where the architecture frames and supports everyday life without dominating it,’ says Pérez Palacios. ‘Curves and strategic cut-outs were introduced to the massing to soften transitions and to respond precisely to the site’s setbacks and zoning restrictions, turning constraints into spatial opportunities.’

The design is rooted in the desire to craft a fluid relationship between the interior and the building's surrounding context. The residence is defined by a rectangular volume and two patios. Outside, the curved roof is a defining characteristic and is inspired by a traditional gabled roof.

These details were adapted to abide by local planning rules and guidelines, a challenging task, Pérez Palacios tells Wallpaper*: ‘Working within a narrow lot and a tight regulatory framework required a careful balance between openness and enclosure. The setbacks, height limits, and buildable envelope shaped the initial massing, but instead of resisting these constraints, we embraced them – carving into the volume and using curves to create fluid connections between interior and exterior. The challenge became an opportunity to generate spatial generosity within a compact footprint.’

Venturing inside the building via a discreet entrance on the side of the house, the layout is divided into two distinct areas. The first spans two levels and is home to social areas on the ground floor; a living room, dining room, kitchen and semi-covered terrace. Meanwhile, the upper levels host private areas, including four bedrooms, three bathrooms and a studio. The second area is situated at the rear of the residence, which offers guest living quarters.

The interior responds to the warm Los Angeles climate. Large windows allow for natural light, can be opened for natural ventilation and offer a visual connection to the outside environment. Other details that add to the home's rich depth and texture are the neutral colour palette and texturally contrasting surfaces throughout, such as oak wood, polished concrete and striated plaster. Together, they craft a visually tactile experience.

The home tightropes between indoors and outdoors living, which is a relationship that Pérez Palacios is particularly fond of: ‘There’s a moment where the curvature of the volume meets the garden, creating an ambiguous space that is neither entirely inside nor outside. It’s a gentle gesture, but it defines the spirit of the house – architecture as a soft interface between life and its surroundings.’

If the idea of a design gallery conjures up images of a whispery white cube filled with plinths and prim collectors clutching their pearls, then it’s time you visited Tiwa Gallery on the fifth floor of a lofty Tribeca building, preferably for one of founder Alex Tieghi-Walker’s opening night dinners.

You’ll find a similar energy of ‘hugging, gossiping, kids and dogs’ at a Marta opening in Los Feliz, Los Angeles. Further up the Californian coast at Blunk Space in Point Reyes Station, JB Blunk’s daughter Mariah Nielson is keeping her father’s democratic spirit of make, do and blend, alive and thriving. And further north still, at Landdd in Portland, you can consider your collectible investments while participating in a sound bath or some flower arranging.

There’s a fascinating shift underway in America’s design gallery sector, proactively driven by a group of socially minded, enterprising young curators who value craft and community engagement as much as commerce. They are inspiring possible routes to market for an emerging generation of designers, and attracting new collecting audiences in their wake. It is, quite possibly, the most interesting development in America’s current design landscape, and there’s much that the rest of the world might learn from their attitudes towards connection.

‘Historically, in the design community, because of the necessary overheads required in owning and operating a gallery space, curators tended to show the work of established names with a guaranteed market to ensure they could pay rent and bills,’ explains design curator and consultant Sonya Tamaddon.

Tamaddon is an alumna of LACMA, Timothy Taylor and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and subsequently consulted with Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery and Tiwa Gallery, as well as the Mexico City- based gallery Masa. She was enlisted by Collectible, the dynamic young Belgian fair for contemporary collectible design, to helm the Curated section of emerging designers at its first New York outing last autumn to rapturous reviews. As a result, she is in hot demand as a gallery whisperer within design.

‘There’s been a shift away from white cube spaces, and a general desire for intimacy in design curation,’ says Tamaddon. ‘Spaces that look and feel like homes help people to engage with design, rather than seeing it as something inaccessible or remote.’ The idea of the gallery as a layered environment, more like a home than a museum, encourages a richer possibility for storytelling through programming, too. Liberated from the gallery catalogue and interpretation panel, young galleries can – and do – host workshops, panel discussions, readings and recitals, which all help to contextualise and enliven the work on show.

This leads to community building. The feeling is akin to hospitality more than the traditional transactional relationship between client and gallerist; the former, more formal hierarchy is melted into something far richer and more democratic between designer, curator and audience. As David Michon describes in his profile of Marta, below, hugging has replaced air kissing.

‘When I began working with designers, many of the projects were juxtaposing art alongside design,’ Tamaddon says. ‘And there was a real discomfort in placing them together. What’s interesting to me is that now that the barriers between different disciplines have eroded, there is far greater dialogue and connection.’ Tamaddon describes the manifold ways in which such dialogue manifests, not just between designers and artists, but across generations and into native and ancestral roots; between designers and different cultural contexts and spatial environments; and between designers, gallerists and collectors, too.

‘There are a lot of collectors here with a great deal of imagination when it comes to contemporary design,’ notes Tamaddon. ‘In Europe, the depth of history means that people inherit furniture, and antiques carry a certain weight. I am a first-generation Persian-American citizen – I have nothing from Iran, and I’m not going to design my home with anything inherited. In the US, the legacy of heirlooms is not part of our consciousness to anything like the same extent as it is in other cultures.’

Liberated from the trappings of the art market and unencumbered by the dusty reverence towards antiques, the US collectible design market is blossoming, thanks to a vanguard of young curators that are driven by a passion for design and a belief in its narrative value, not just its commercial worth or investment potential. On the following pages, we introduce six galleries that we find compelling; each has a mission and a values-based agenda. Each has found a loyal and captive audience in a few short years since the pandemic receded. As Tamaddon concludes, ‘There’s a genuine excitement and a hunger for diversity within collectible design here in the US, connected by a generous, community spirit.’ Group shows and group hugs are the way forward.

Tiwa Gallery – New York

There’s always a project underway at Tiwa Gallery, the live-in exhibition space that Alex Tieghi-Walker runs on the fifth floor of a former factory building in Manhattan’s Tribeca. Like the artists he exhibits, who are usually self-taught and conceive of and fabricate their objects, Tieghi-Walker is hands-on and is learning as he goes. Recently, he installed a clawfoot bathtub, built a wall and spent a few weeks stripping paint from the window frames.

‘I’m a triple Sag,’ says Tieghi-Walker. ‘I get really restless, and I think I get very visually restless as well.’ The lived-in, ever-evolving nature of the gallery helps it feel human, which, in turn, makes it feel more approachable.

Along with his personal collection of antique furniture, quilts and ceramics, the space is filled with artefacts from previous exhibitions: Murano glass vases by Dana Arbib, a hand-carved chair by Minjae Kim, a silk and copper lamp by Cadis. A drop-in is more like paying a house call than visiting a gallery. ‘I like that it’s personal and intimate,’ Tieghi-Walker says. ‘The gallery is a real display of things in the world that interest me, and the values that are important to me.’ Those values include a respect for history, the natural world, and material exploration. But overall, a belief that craft is on par with the highest forms of art, as well as being an indispensable part of daily life for everyone. ‘This world is easier to access than you may think,’ reflects Tieghi-Walker.

Since its launch in 2021, Tieghi-Walker’s curatorial project Tiwa Select has continued to expand. It began as an online shop with Supreme-like drops of objects for sale, before morphing into a pop-up gallery in Tieghi- Walker’s former LA home, and then became a series of installations before its current incarnation. Over time, the sphere of Tieghi- Walker’s influence has grown, too. In 2023, he participated in a satellite exhibition of young galleries held during Frieze London, and next year, he’ll exhibit alongside more established design galleries, such as Friedman Benda. ‘I’m constantly learning about the design world, the art world, and seeing those patterns of how something goes from being a crafted object to a design object to an art piece. When does something stop being a crafted object and become a design piece?’ For example, the self-taught sculptor Vince Skelly was a musician and skater before he began making stools from salvaged wood; he now creates monolithic furniture pieces that are exhibited in galleries like Tiwa.

Right now, Tieghi-Walker is figuring out the right balance between staying hands on with artists, collectors and customers, and what comes next. ‘What I do is through instinct rather than thinking strategically – which might be my downfall at times – but I like the pace that I do things.’ He’s planned out exhibitions until the end of the year, including a solo show of Rich Aybar’s rubber and resin objects, but looking into the future, he’s more interested in group shows and a looser way of working. ‘I don’t have a big team to coordinate things,’ he says. ‘It’s very much me.’ Diana Budds

Landdd – Portland

Part gallery, part studio, part community space – Portland-based Landdd resists simple definition. Rooted in Latin American craft traditions and shaped by contemporary design sensibilities, it was founded in the embers of the pandemic by Lillian Hardy and Javier Reyes, at a time when people were craving community and connection.

Originally from rural Alabama, Hardy brings a background in art direction. Reyes, born in the Dominican Republic, runs the acclaimed Oaxaca-based design studio Rrres and works closely with artisans across Mexico. Together, the pair envisioned a space for shared creativity – a platform for artists and makers from the global south, as well as a setting for workshops and events focused on creative learning. At the time, in early 2022, commercial space was easy to come by, and the duo took on a disused ambulance repository in the city’s old town, which they then renovated themselves.

Today, the sunlit showroom hosts a rotating display of handwoven rugs, clay lamps and palm sculptures, all made using natural materials and traditional techniques with artisans from Oaxaca. But it’s the events calendar that has transformed Landdd from gallery to gathering place. From flower arranging and incense making to sound baths and live performances, these happenings have created a steady rhythm of community engagement and creative experimentation.

Over the past year, that rhythm has expanded outdoors. ‘A lot of people come to Portland because they want to be outside,' says Hardy. 'So it made sense to meet them there.' From forest walks to alfresco workshops, the move marks a natural progression, and has prompted Hardy to begin thinking of their work in two halves: in and out. Indoors, the focus remains on interior objects, storytelling and rituals. Outdoors, the practice is looser, more ephemeral, and often shaped by the seasons.

As well as striking a chord in their local creative community, Landdd's approach has recently caught the attention of some major US outdoor adventure brands that were drawn to its grounded aesthetic and values-led ethos. Still, the project remains intentionally small, independent and deeply intuitive. 'We never started with a business plan, says Hardy. 'We just keep responding to what feels human and honest.'

Research, travel and lived experience all feed into the products they design, make and sell, with Reyes in ongoing dialogue with the Zapotec weaving communities, and Hardy bringing a sensibility shaped by storytelling and identity. 'It's fundamental to us that when people see one of our textiles, they understand where it's coming from; that there's a connection there,' explains Reyes. 'If that's not transmitted, then it's just a textile. More than half its value is knowing where it's come from and how it's made.'

As Landdd looks ahead to its fourth year, its role is ever evolving – not as a gallery in the traditional sense, but as a living, breathing world of its own. Ali Morris.

Superhouse – New York

Exhibitions at downtown New York gallery Superhouse, which Stephen Markos opened in 2021, draw from an eclectic group of artists and designers. Recently, this has included new and historic furniture by fine woodworking legends Tom Loeser and Wendy Maruyama; a terrazzo trompe-l’oeil pool table by up-and-coming studio Ficus Interfaith; and a glossy red vanity table from the 1980s by Elizabeth Browning Jackson. While the makers of these objects hail from different movements, disciplines and time periods, and are rarely exhibited together as a result, they share conceptual rigour, meticulous attention to craft and a boundary-breaking spirit. And finally, they are in conversation with one another.

Art furniture has had a long history in the US, though it has existed somewhat in the shadows compared to European movements. With Superhouse, Markos is bringing renewed attention to key figures, many of whom exhibited with the influential and under-acknowledged gallery Art et Industrie, which ran from 1977-1999 in New York. ‘It was our radical period,’ says Markos. ‘A lot of contemporary American artists owe what they are doing now to this vanguard from 45 years ago. And not a lot of galleries and institutions in the past 20 years have done much with the material.’

Through Superhouse’s exhibitions, Markos has placed work by these artists into major museum collections. The Art Institute of Chicago recently acquired a suite of works by Browning Jackson that were languishing in her barn; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston purchased an early carved lamp by Maruyama, one of the few women in fine woodworking; and a totemic lamp and jewellery box by Alex Locadia (a Black artist from Brooklyn, who exhibited at Art et Industrie, but wasn’t embraced by his peers) went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. And earlier this year, Markos exhibited a series of works by Dan Friedman, a graphic designer who began a furniture and sculpture practice a few years before he died due to complications from AIDS in 1995, and brought them into important private collections. ‘I don’t mean it to sound grand, but it’s righting the wrongs of the past,’ Markos says.

And he’s also making sure that thrilling contemporary artists don’t experience the same outcome. Superhouse recently helped a stool by Kim Mupangilaï, a Belgian- Congolese artist who explores her identity and lineage through furniture, to enter the Vitra Design Museum collection.

This autumn, the gallery will host a debut solo show of sculptures by Colin Knight, a Virginia-based artist who explores the intersection of historical conflict and design. ‘Having diversity of voices is really important to me,’ notes Markos. ‘Whether it’s people that are further on or younger in their careers, who come from different backgrounds, or who work in different materials – the main goal is the quality of the work and the perspective that each artist brings.’ Diana Budds.

Dudd Haus – Philadelphia

Stepping into Dudd Haus, which opened in downtown Philadelphia earlier this year, is like entering a Lynchian Black Lodge for design. Heavy crimson curtains line the walls of the narrow room, which is decorated with a black-and-white chequerboard floor and a mural of snowy mountains. But the space’s inhabitants aren’t Dale Cooper and Laura Palmer; they’re a cabinet made from melted plastic bags and beer cans by Chen Chen & Kai Williams; a steel and glass table lamp with an iridescent finish loosely based on an acid trip by the Montreal-based designer Jean-Michel Gadoua, and a puzzle- like bench by the UK-based woodworker James Burial, among dozens of other fascinating objects that all sit comfortably in the blurry intersection of art and design.

‘I love the feeling of going into an antique store where you have the opportunity to just take yourself on a journey and find things,’ says the gallery’s co-founder Chris Held, who also founded Jonalddudd, an itinerant New York Design Week curatorial project that began ten years ago to create space for designers to exhibit experimental, often irreverent, work. To wit: a wood chair coated in crushed eggshells; a floor lamp sculpted from papier-mâché embedded with flowers; and the screws and bolts that hold a table together presented like jewels in a treasure chest were part of Jonalddudd’s installations this year. It’s the type of conceptual work that makes design curators salivate.

‘We’d all love to be selling these weird things because it would make our lives easier, but the purpose of someone producing the objects we typically show at Jonalddudd is to be outside the monetary system that we’re all forced to operate under,’ Held says. ‘That to me is really punk and I love the spirit of it.’ Over time, the exhibition became larger, as did the community of people around it. There was a sense among the collaborators that it should last longer than a week, hence the opening of a permanent gallery.

Everything in Dudd Haus is for sale – designers still need to keep the lights on, after all – but there’s a sense that the gallery is more about keeping a renegade spirit alive (for the makers of the objects, as well as for the people who appreciate them) than it is about cashing a cheque. The gallery is structured like a cooperative, with different tiers of membership included on its website and/or in the gallery. Additionally, the gallery takes sales commissions at a lower rate than typical dealers. The roster includes established figures who have successful businesses but want to try something different, and emerging practices that might not have gallery or retail representation.

‘There’s a huge benefit for a new, up- and-coming designer to literally share a space with a Steven Bukowski,’ says Charles Constantine, founder of furniture company Bestcase, co-founder of Dudd Haus and an organiser of Jonalddudd. ‘And that road goes both ways. If you’ve had a practice for a while, it’s nice to be in a position where you can talk to someone who has a newer, fresher point of view.’

Blunk Space – Marin County

The chainsaw was, and really does remain, a pretty badass tool for art. It was JB Blunk’s tool of choice and, even without knowing much about him, it immediately places him ‘out in nature’, somewhere with big trees. And he was: in this case, Marin County in Northern California. Many, many sculptural works in wood later (as well as ceramics and paintings), the impetus for his first chainsaw purchase is now one of his most important legacies: his home.

It’s hard to separate the idea of Blunk the man from Blunk the place. That home, on a hillside in Inverness, wasn’t just where he lived – it was his greatest artwork. Every door handle, every stool, every post and beam bears the imprint of a mind tuned to that material. It’s still mainly as it was, but now it’s occupied again by his daughter Mariah Nielson, who spent her childhood there, sometimes loving it, sometimes hating it, and now back to loving it.

Nielson understands legacy as precious few do; it’s not about freezing something in time but keeping something alive, active. Hence Blunk Space: a gallery, studio space, and at-times residency established in 2021 in nearby Point Reyes Station.

‘Gallery’ is also a very active concept in the Blunksphere. ‘It was an exhibition,’ Nielson puts it simply, ‘that changed my father’s life.’ In fact, you can sort of plot out the life of JB Blunk through a series of key shows. The first was an exhibition of mingei (Japanese folk art) at Scripps College, in Claremont, California, visited in the mid-1940s as an university student, which convinced Blunk to become an artist. Then, there was an exhibition of his own work at Tokyo gallery Chūō Kōron in 1954 (it was organised by Isamu Noguchi after they met checking out some mingei in Tokyo in 1952, and it helped Blunk pay for a return flight home to the US after three years in Japan). And now, posthumously, it’s Blunk Space.

What Nielson does isn’t about commerce, really (almost none of the best things in this world are). Instead, it sort of mirrors her father’s experience: it’s about ‘encounter’ – both between a person and a space (because ‘a place is always a part of a story,’ says Nielson, and Inverness has its impact), and between one person and another.

A Blunk Space exhibition, as a result, is most often not a ‘solo’ experience – it’s an ‘and’: Martino Gamper and Adam Pogue; Rio Kobayashi and Fritz Rauh; Solange Roberdeau and Jochen Holz; Rick Yoshimoto and Charles de Lisle; Rachel Kaye and Jay Nelson – you get the point. Nielson is, in this sense, not at all a ‘curator’, but a convenor – and that’s better. As much as she’s an access point and guide into her father’s world, she also delights in getting out of the way. Perhaps the worst way to manage a legacy is to try too hard to control what that legacy is, and Nielson doesn’t. Instead, in true Californian spirit, she lets some forces bigger than any individual take over – just as they had done for JB Blunk: nature, coincidence and chemistry. David Michon

Marta – Los Angeles

It’s not always the case that, when you attend a gallery opening, the ‘regulars’ also include any number of artists from past shows. But, the set at Los Angeles gallery Marta does. Somehow, unintentionally, they’ve tapped into an ‘inevitable community’, speeding up connections in a centreless, wide, flaky LA where social circles grow at a slow pace. Their openings, as a result, feel akin to a house party – a lot of hugging, gossiping, kids, dogs and, if you’re lucky, a spontaneous dinner at Speranza nearby. Air kisses are taboo.

It’s been like this ever since they were at the now-called Little Marta, a small space on the Echo Park stretch of Sunset Boulevard at the front of co-founder Benjamin Critton’s former graphic design office, where the gallery first opened in 2019. His partner in work and life, Heidi Korsavong, comes from an art history and interior design background – she zhuzhed the space and got it ready for its ‘gallery’ life, with some gardening help from friends, local landscapers Terremoto.

Marta upgraded in 2023, and the new Los Feliz space is much bigger, double-height, and even has a small, mostly secret studio apartment for visiting artists. Nifemi Marcus-Bello just stayed, in town from Lagos for the third act in a three-part series shown by Marta (and being collected into a book to be published by Apartamento later this year). Critton and Korsavong moved from

New York in 2016 (though Korsavong is from Southern California), and they’ve shown back there a few times, including an exhibition of toilet roll holders, co-curated with Emmanuel Olunkwa. Another, with auctioneer Catalog Sale, paired archival chairs with some wacky new ones made by a series of designers in just three days.

But Marta’s character is found in its California-ness: free-spirited, label-adverse, earthy and unpretentious, even if a little brainy when you dig in. ‘Integrity’, says Korsavong, ‘rewards over time.’ Why wait though? In just six years, the Marta community is already an obvious legacy.

Everything about Marta feels as if it’s about ‘home’ – being one, and imagining art and design in it. Back at Little Marta, in 2021, there was a show of mesmerisingly simple, paint-splattered artists’ benches saved from a junk pile at the shuttered MacArthur Park campus of the Chouinard Art Institute by Corinne Hartley, an alumna, in 1972. That’s very specific! And, non-commercial. But, ‘it was an access point to LA,’ says Critton. ‘People kept saying, “You know who else went there? Mary Corse! Ed Ruscha!” You start to understand the network and how the foundation of LA as an artistic city was laid.’

Again (and again, unintentionally), Marta seems all about surfacing not just ‘an artist’, but something more social. It helps you make sense of what any of this (the works at Marta) has to do with any of that (the LA around you). Even when the artist has come over from Nigeria, somehow Marta softly makes it speak to the home that is here. And with the politics of America right now, it’s an important talent. David Michon.

Porsche makes waves in the surfboard design stakes, partnering with California-based Almond Surfboards on a limited-edition collection of retro-inspired apparel and a custom-made surfboard.

The classic Porsche 911 Carrera RS 2.7 inspired the collection, evoking laid-back California charm. The 6ft swallowtail surfboard will come in three distinct colourways, ‘Grand Prix White’ with a choice of blue, red, or green detailing. With only 72 boards made, the limited edition nods to the historic sports car’s year of introduction, 1972.

Porsche and Almond Surfboards’ limited-edition collection

It's the second iteration of Porsche's collaboration with Almond Surfboards, titled ‘Single Fins & Air-Cooled Engines’, which debuted in 2024. The inaugural collection focused on the mid-1960s for inspiration, a formative era in surfing that coincided with the launch of the distinctive Porsche 911, in 1963.

‘We are thrilled to continue our partnership with Almond Surfboards, this time [honouring] one of the most celebrated 911 models of all time,’ said Karsten von Engeln, president and CEO at Porsche Design of America. ‘Together with the team at Almond, we’ve created a distinctive, high-performance surfboard that will appeal not only to surfing enthusiasts and Porsche fans, but also to design aficionados. It looks just as good in the water as it does on the roof of a Porsche, or on the wall in your home.’

Handmade in California, the board is crafted in polyurethane foam with basswood stringers. It is finished with a fibreglass shell with two layers of 6oz cloth on the deck and one layer on the bottom. Its fuller outline and narrow tail are designed for functionality to match its aesthetic appeal.

The limited-edition surfboard is crafted with a white base, and customers can then choose their preferred colour. Details include Carrera lettering, the Porsche crest and the Almond Surfboards logo, along with a ‘72’ racing number. On the underside of the board is the Porsche logo, and a single fin in the chosen colourway – recalling the coloured Fuchsfelge wheels on the 911 Carrera RS 2.7.

‘For this new collection, we chose to shape a 6ft winged swallowtail design that draws inspiration from both the iconic 911 Carrera RS 2.7, renowned for its powerful performance and unique silhouette, and the surfboard designs of the early 1970s – the same era that this 1972 Porsche celebrates – with their blend of classic lines and cutting-edge performance,' said Dave Allee, founder of Almond Surfboards.

Along with the board, the collection features T-shirts, caps, a sweatshirt, a beach towel, boardshorts, a canvas tote, and handmade surf flags. Also included is a sticker set, a woven patch, a model car and a California Surf Guide.

Headquartered in Germany, Porsche has a longstanding connection with Southern California. When it first introduced the 911 RS 2.7, its clean design and ducktail spoiler gathered fans and became synonymous with surfing, with the image of a surfboard pitched on the roof still a recognised symbol of a retro beach lifestyle. The brand’s Heritage Design strategy, meanwhile, has seen it keen to evoke its icons from decades past, with special editions such as the recent Porsche 911 Spirit 70.

The Porsche x Almond surfboard retails for $3,000, with apparel priced from $45-$155. porsche.com, almondsurfboards.com

Fancy an all-electric surfboard? We tried the Lind Canvas in the Stockholm archipelago

In the California desert, where the light moves with intention and silence holds shape, architect Steven Harris and his longtime collaborator – and husband – designer Lucien Rees Roberts have built a home. Set within Rancho Mirage, Tamarisk House is a meditation on presence, one meant to be shared with friends. The surrounding landscape, both magical and precise, is home to some of America’s most iconic midcentury modern and contemporary architectural works.

Inside Steven Harris and Lucien Rees Roberts' home in Rancho Mirage

Their residence, sited on the Tamarisk Golf Club, is the second that the couple has designed in the area. The first – an elegant villa just next door – now serves as a guest house. The new structure, co-designed by the pair, reflects a deep sense of clarity and intimacy, with space carved not only for light and air, but also for Harris’s passion for cars: a collection housed with as much care as the architecture itself.

In sharing the information on this home, it is important to note the centrality of the landscape, which the owners tell us influenced much of the architectural design. For instance, most homes in the area have been built with few windows on the street side to ensure privacy and seclusion. Tamarisk House maintains that design choice on the street side, while the rear features large windows to capture light and mountain views.

Upon entering from the carport area, for instance, you are greeted by a striking long mural by artist Nick Perkins, and on that wall, facing away from the street, are clerestory windows, providing ample natural light. The entrance area is adorned with vintage jacaranda wood panels for Brazil, which were created in the 1960s. Additional jacaranda wood was also salvaged to fashion the living room’s coffee table. Once past the entry, and just down a few steps, an expansive living room opens onto a direct view of the surrounding mountains.

Surveying the space, it is clear that the designers strove to create a look of seamlessness between the interior and the landscape. 'On the side toward the golf course, there's an attempt to make the space inside and outside as continuous as possible. The floor is Roman travertine. As it moves outside, it is also Roman travertine, and they're at the same level,' says Harris. The 'inordinately large pieces of glass; each pane is about three meters by six meters,' also facilitates a feeling of continuity between indoors and out.

Yet the full design of the property transcends the building’s structure: the property’s landscaping, designed by David Kelly, is also consistent in its topography, plantings and overall look and feel with that of the golf course, once again, enabling direct visual connection to the surroundings. One would assume, with all that soaring glass, it would invite the prying eyes of golfers, but privacy is afforded by strategically placed berms that obscure the house from the direct view of passersby also effectively make it seem like there are no other homes around, which also, cleverly, enabled the couple to avoid installing tall hedges or obtrusive fencing.

Returning to the interior, the seating choices reflect a design aesthetic that is unapologetically modern, such as the Danish slung chair from the 1970s, but also practical, comfortable and approachable. 'The idea was sort of a casual elegance where we could feel comfortable,' Rees Roberts shares. The idea of balancing haute design with approachability is important to the couple. 'On the right, in the ceiling by the curtains, is where there's a screen that drops down from the ceiling, and we project movies on it. So this sofa and the sofa right in front of the viewpoint here are where we can sit with friends and watch movies.'

The home does indeed perfectly blend unique vintage and contemporary elements in a way that is both practical and comfortable while still being striking due to the art pieces and high-end natural materials. 'It was initially a little unnerving to me that when some people came to the house, one of their questions was who the architect was, and when was this built? They presumed it was an old house. At first, I was a little taken aback, but thinking about it, I decided I liked that. I liked the fact that you couldn't date it. That it didn't have, uh, it wasn't a diva house, in other words, uh, it sort of looked like it had always been there,' Harris says. 'It takes a lot of work to make something look effortless. And I think the house is a bit effortless looking, and not contrived or complicated unnecessarily.'

Wherever Stephanie-Dolores Henkle and Jordan Crane have lived, they’ve gone all in. In the once-industrial Jersey City, New Jersey, they shared a small warehouse. When they bought in the historic town of Hudson, New York, they purchased a property dating back to the 1840s.

Ten years ago, a job opportunity brought the couple westward to the San Francisco Bay. In order to part with their life on the East Coast, their home of more than two decades, the house had to be good.

Henkle and Crane found a front-runner in a three-bedroom, two-bathroom mid-century modern, perched on a sloped parcel in the Berkeley Hills. ‘When we walked into the house and saw the views, it was like, 100 per cent – we love this place,’ remembers Henkle, who works as a recruiter.

The couple had reason to fall head over heels: The home was designed in 1956 by Chinese-American architect Roger Lee for noted biochemist Clinton Ballou and his wife and professional collaborator, Dorothy. The two-level house, with its simple floor plan, warm timber-panelled walls, and stunning views across the bay, was virtually untouched; The Ballou’s cherished the house so much that they lived in it for more than 50 years.

‘Because there were so few owners, that meant fewer things we had to undo,’ says Crane, a designer and creative director.

They scored the house after beating out 13 other bidders. Before diving into a renovation, though, Henkle and Crane wanted to determine exactly what they needed. So they spent a few years living there to get acquainted with the landscape, the light and the building’s quirks. They loved its warmth, midcentury feel and architectural significance, but felt, with a few tweaks, it could feel contemporary. The ‘70s-era appliances also would have to go.

For help, they called Casper Mork-Ulnes, an award-winning, Norwegian-born architect with offices in both San Francisco and Oslo. Though Mork-Ulnes’s firm was well-versed in historic projects, particularly Victorian conversions, this would be his first time working in the shadow of a modernist. ‘I was immediately a little bit frightened, because it was such a great house,’ the architect admits.

Both Mork-Ulnes and the clients knew that any design intervention would need to be a light one. ‘We wanted to keep his original intent,’ says Crane. ‘We kept saying, if Roger Lee came in today, would he approve of the things we did?’

The solution, therefore, was an edit as opposed to a gut.

Mork-Ulnes found a kindred spirit in Lee, who died in 1981. ‘He made modernism approachable and not just for the rich, which is something we've also done with a lot of our projects,’ the architect explains.

Working with Lee’s original drawings for the home, Mork-Ulnes sought to bring the home even more in keeping with the architect’s original design intent. ‘We tried to distill the concept and make it more clear with some very simple, highly-surgical moves,’ Mork-Ulnes explains.

First, he wanted to improve legibility between interior and exterior. ‘The Modernists of that time were really about blurring the interior and the outside, in particular in California,’ explains Mork-Ulnes. So he carefully cut away some of the interior walls so that, from the front door, you can see through the house and out to the bay beyond.

The most significant design move came by way of a central rectilinear volume, to which the architect moved storage, the pantry and the house’s two bathrooms. Clad in meranti timber, it virtually disappears. But the bathrooms hide a fun surprise: open the door and you will find yourself surrounded by floor-to-ceiling tomato-red tiles, a hue inspired by fiery sunsets over the bay.

‘I think people are almost, like “What did they change here?”’ says Mork-Ulnes. ‘It was that surgical.’

The remainder of the project was in the details: outlets were concealed in the floor, dated trim was removed in favour of crisp shadow gaps, the original floors were sanded. Even the HVAC vents were designed to disappear. ‘So much of the project was what not to do,’ says Crane of the design brief. ‘Do less, hide things, take away.’

‘I think Roger Lee would have appreciated that,’ adds Mork-Ulnes.

A favourite space is the timber-clad, galley-style kitchen. Like the Ballous – who earned a reputation for cooking gourmet meals and serving hand-cranked ice cream to the biochemistry department at UC Berkeley – Henkle and Crane love to entertain. But instead of replacing the galley-style midcentury kitchen with an open-concept one, they decided to lean into the cosiness. A small dining room is tucked into a corner behind it, while a cocktail bar is hidden behind a door in the central storage volume.

Because of the pandemic, construction on the home got off to a slow start and wrapped up in 2022. In the years since, though, Henkle, Crane and their American pitbull terrier, Shotsi are enjoying everything the home has to offer. ‘It’s so warm and comfortable, especially in the evening when the fireplace is on and the sun is setting,’ Henkle says. ‘You can see the city lights and it’s really cool.’

‘It has this sexy, late-night Tokyo vibe,’ adds Crane.

Mork-Ulnes, for his part, hopes to have dinner with his clients soon. ‘I haven't had one of their cocktails yet,' he jokes.

So would the project earn Lee’s stamp of approval? Says Ulnes, ‘I think he would be very happy because we tried our absolute hardest to reinforce his concept and the aura of this place.’

Italian architect Mirtilla Alliata di Montereale grew up in Hawaii and relocated to Los Angeles in 2016 to complete her architecture studies at SCI-Arc, which were closely followed by professional training at Frank Gehry and Kulapat Yantrasast. Since 2021, she’s been a designer at WHY Architecture, recently finalising her first independent project, Casa Azzurra, a holiday rental inspired by her childhood summers in the volcanic Aeolian Islands and the wild, rugged nature of Joshua Tree. Now based part-time in the Californian national park, Alliata di Montereale continues to discover spaces and places in the region that shape her creative practice. Here, she shares a design-minded itinerary to ‘slow down, look closely, and discover the desert through a more intentional lens.’

What to see and do in Joshua Tree, Mirtilla Alliata di Montereale’s tips

Where to stay

Casa Azzurra

‘Casa Azzurra is a home that feels like a daydream. Whether you’re lounging by the pool, cooking under the pergola, or watching stars from the hot tub, it’s a place that leaves space for both memory-making and pause.’

roam-properties.com

Where to eat and drink

The Copper Room

‘It feels like a time capsule in the best way – velvet booths, jazz on vinyl, and cocktails that are strong and smart. The Copper Room originally opened in the 1950s on the private air strip and was lovingly restored in recent years to preserve its vintage glamour while adding a modern desert touch. Their take on steak frites or the house burger never disappoints.’

The Copper Room is located at 57360 Aviation Dr, Yucca Valley, CA 92284, United States.

Más o Menos

‘This is my go-to for a relaxed drink, natural wines, mezcal cocktails, and an effortlessly cool atmosphere. It’s intimate and unfussy, with just the right kind of desert energy.’

Más o Menos is located at 66031 29 Palms Hwy, Joshua Tree, CA 92252, United States.

Pappy & Harriet’s

‘Legendary in every sense – live music under the stars, smoky BBQ, and a packed room buzzing with good vibes. If there’s a show, make a reservation early – it’s worth planning your night around.’

Pappy & Harriet’s is located at 53688 Pioneertown Rd, Pioneertown, CA 92268, United States.

What to do

Hidden Valley Nature Trailhead

‘This is one of my favourite easy hikes. Think surreal rock formations, tons of Joshua Trees, and a perfect intro to the landscape. Go early and you’ll feel like you have the whole place to yourself.’

Noah Purifoy Outdoor Art Museum

‘This place always blows my mind. It’s an expansive, open-air museum filled with large-scale sculptures made from salvaged materials. Noah Purifoy was an artist and civil rights activist who believed in making art accessible to everyone, and this desert museum was his final and most powerful statement. It’s raw, wild, and full of soul – like a treasure hunt for thought-provoking installations.’

Noah Purifoy Outdoor Art Museum is located at 62975 Blair Ln, Joshua Tree, CA 92252, United States.

Sound Bath at The Integratron

‘The Integratron was built in the 1950s by George Van Tassel, an aviator and ufologist who claimed the design came from extraterrestrial transmissions. Whether or not you believe the story, the dome’s acoustics are unbelievable, and the sound bath is a truly one-of-a-kind meditative experience.’

The Integratron is located at 2477 Belfield Blvd, Landers, CA 92285, United States. It's currently closed and will reopen to the public in early September.

Where to shop

Pioneertown Mane Street

‘Built in the 1940s by Roy Rogers and Gene Autry as a live-in movie set for Hollywood westerns, Pioneertown still looks and feels like an old Wild West village. The shops are real, the saloon is lively, and you’ll find yourself walking through cinematic history.’

Pioneertown Mane Street is located at 53626 Mane St, Pioneertown, CA 92268, United States.

The Station

‘An old gas station turned boutique shop, full of desert kitsch and retro treasures. The space was revived by artist and designer Kime Buzzelli, and her love for colour, nostalgia, and Americana gives it a playful and artistic energy.’

The Station is located at 61943 29 Palms Hwy, Joshua Tree, CA 92252, United States.

The story of this minimalist weekend retreat, Amnesia House, starts by revisiting another project, the four-storey family residence Remember House in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. Both were designed for the same family by Edmonds + Lee Architects, a practice based in the city’s Mission District, and neither is easily forgotten.

If Remember House was constrained by its urban location and vertical layout, the new project, a private getaway, spreads out elegantly on a rural plot in California’s famed Napa Valley. Both, however, display partners Robert Edmonds and Vivian Lee’s renowned formal clarity and contemporary spirit.

A minimalist weekend retreat is a place for making memories

'One of the main challenges was working within the constraints of the site, which presented logistical difficulties, including limited access for construction materials and a need to carefully preserve the natural surroundings,' explains Edmonds.

Although it looks effortless, the house is actually sited on a tricky 19-acre parcel comprising a rocky ledge next to a ravine. The architects scoured the challenging plot for a suitable site, finally identifying a sliver of land on which to place the house. It is this context that informed the long, narrow silhouette of the house.

Designed to ‘strike the elusive balance between privacy and expansive views’, the house is divided into a double bar plan separating public and private spaces. Its crisp gable roofs and steel envelopes reference the local wood barns and corrugated metal sheds, but also the clean lines of Nordic cabins.

They are clad in Cor-Ten steel, which ages gracefully but also offers inherently higher resistance to wildfires than fire-treated wood. The dual-layer, custom Core-Ten cladding was designed to eliminate gaps (a fire risk for flying embers).

‘Besides building a concrete bunker, there is frankly not much more we could have done to make this house fire resilient,’ says Edmonds. 'We took great care with selecting fire-resistant materials that enhance the architecture and don’t detract from it.'

There are fire sprinklers everywhere, inside and in the garden, with the various spaces linked by seamless terrazzo-ground concrete floors. Large openings framed in the exterior’s Cor-Ten add a layer of warm colour to the interior, and further link the interiors with the surrounding landscape.

United by a central glazed vestibule, the volumes are oriented east to west, with the entrance at one end and a swimming pool at the other. A series of deep roof overhangs create space for a poolside terrace and provide protection from the sun. ‘We wanted to treat the ends as open as possible to make the patios feel like they bleed out beyond the house,’ explains Edmonds.

As well as Danish Garde Hvalsøe cabinetry, the open-plan kitchen and dining space features a wonderful piece by Studio Drift, who have turned their original artwork Fragile Future, composed of dandelion seeds, into a stunning chandelier.

'The living room is a favourite space of ours,' says Edmond. 'We specifically positioned it to capture the best views of the site, especially during the golden hour, when the sunset bathes the space in warm, soft light. This time of day highlights the surrounding landscape and brings a natural glow to the room, enhancing the sense of tranquility and connection to nature.'

Another highlight is the primary bedroom suite, which is tucked into the eastern gable of the home, away from the public areas. 'It contains expansive windows that frame views and an adjoining private terrace porch that opens directly onto sweeping valley vistas,' explains Edmonds. 'At the terrace, ancient rock outcrops literally rise through the terrace slab, creating a moment where the geology seems to overtake the architecture.

'We were inspired by the site itself and the passage of time. We envisioned a home of simple form, built from deeply honest materials and intrinsically tied to its landscape. We hope the home will grow more beautiful with each passing decade,' concludes the architect.

edmondslee.com