Tour an architect and designer’s achingly cool midcentury fashionable house within the Californian desert

Within the California desert, the place the sunshine strikes with intention and silence holds form, architect Steven Harris and his longtime collaborator – and husband – designer Lucien Rees Roberts have constructed a house. Set inside Rancho Mirage, Tamarisk Home is a meditation on presence, one meant to be shared with buddies. The encompassing panorama, each magical and exact, is house to a few of America’s most iconic mid-century fashionable and up to date architectural works.

Inside Steven Harris and Lucien Rees Roberts’ house in Rancho Mirage

Their residence, sited on the Tamarisk Golf Membership, is the second that the couple has designed within the space. The primary – a chic villa simply subsequent door – now serves as a visitor home. The brand new construction, co-designed by the pair, displays a deep sense of readability and intimacy, with area carved not just for mild and air, but additionally for Harris’s ardour for vehicles: a group housed with as a lot care because the structure itself.

In sharing the knowledge on this house, you will need to be aware the centrality of the panorama, which the homeowners inform us influenced a lot of the architectural design. For example, most houses within the space have been constructed with few home windows on the road aspect to make sure privateness and seclusion. Tamarisk Home maintains that design alternative on the road aspect, whereas the rear options giant home windows to seize mild and mountain views.

Upon getting into from the carport space, as an illustration, you might be greeted by a placing lengthy mural by artist Nick Perkins, and on that wall, going through away from the road, are clerestory home windows, offering ample pure mild. The doorway space is adorned with classic jacaranda wooden panels for Brazil, which had been created within the Sixties. Extra jacaranda wooden was additionally salvaged to vogue the lounge’s espresso desk. As soon as previous the entry, and simply down a number of steps, an expansive lounge opens onto a direct view of the encompassing mountains.

Surveying the area, it’s clear that the designers strove to create a glance of seamlessness between the inside and the panorama. ‘On the aspect towards the golf course, there’s an try to make the area inside and outdoors as steady as attainable. The ground is Roman travertine. Because it strikes outdoors, it is usually Roman travertine, and so they’re on the similar stage,’ says Harris. The ‘inordinately giant items of glass; every pane is about three meters by six meters,’ additionally facilitates a sense of continuity between indoors and out.

But the complete design of the property transcends the constructing’s construction: the property’s landscaping, designed by David Kelly, can also be constant in its topography, plantings and general appear and feel with that of the golf course, as soon as once more, enabling direct visible connection to the environment. One would assume, with all that hovering glass, it could invite the prying eyes of golfers, however privateness is afforded by strategically positioned berms that obscure the home from the direct view of passersby additionally successfully make it seem to be there aren’t any different houses round, which additionally, cleverly, enabled the couple to keep away from putting in tall hedges or obtrusive fencing.

Returning to the inside, the seating selections mirror a design aesthetic that’s unapologetically fashionable, such because the Danish slung chair from the Seventies, but additionally sensible, comfy and approachable. ‘The thought was form of an off-the-cuff magnificence the place we may really feel comfy,’ Rees Roberts shares. The thought of balancing haute design with approachability is vital to the couple. ‘On the best, within the ceiling by the curtains, is the place there is a display that drops down from the ceiling, and we venture films on it. So this couch and the couch proper in entrance of the point of view listed below are the place we are able to sit with buddies and watch films.’

The house does certainly completely mix distinctive classic and up to date components in a method that’s each sensible and comfy whereas nonetheless being placing because of the artwork items and high-end pure supplies. ‘It was initially just a little unnerving to me that when some individuals got here to the home, considered one of their questions was who the architect was, and when was this constructed? They presumed it was an outdated home. At first, I used to be just a little bowled over, however eager about it, I made a decision I appreciated that. I appreciated the truth that you could not date it. That it did not have, uh, it wasn’t a diva home, in different phrases, uh, it form of seemed prefer it had at all times been there,’ Harris says. ‘It takes plenty of work to make one thing look easy. And I believe the home is a bit easy wanting, and never contrived or sophisticated unnecessarily.’