Desert Oasis — a self-initiated high-desert concept study

Max Motif House study 01

Self-initiated concept projectSelf-initiated concept

Twelve minutes off the highway, one pale rectangle on the alluvial fan. Everything else is creosote, rock, and the road that gave up.

00 / 12 · Satellite

Find it from orbit.

Twelve minutes off the highway, one pale rectangle on the alluvial fan. Everything else is creosote, rock, and the road that gave up.

A long plaster wall in low desert sun, cut by one bronze-lined doorway, with agave and mountains behind.

01 / 12 · Approach

Leave the road behind.

A low wall edits the horizon down to one narrow opening. The light gets there first.

A shaded entry corridor aligned to a sunken living room, a long pool, and the desert mountains beyond.

02 / 12 · Threshold

The desert drops ten degrees.

Deep shade compresses the view, then returns the living room, water, and mountains on one axis.

A walled entry courtyard with a single multi-trunk palo verde in pale gravel, its shadow thrown across bone plaster.

03 / 12 · Courtyard

One tree, and the sky it borrowed.

Inside the wall the desert is edited down to gravel, a palo verde, and a rectangle of sky that moves across the plaster all afternoon.

A low sectional and stone table in a sunken living room, open along one whole side to the pool and a setting sun.

04 / 12 · Living

Inside still points outside.

One broad step lowers the room into stone and linen, keeping the pool and horizon in sight.

A long interior gallery beside the pool, narrow clerestory slots throwing a repeating ladder of warm sun across travertine.

05 / 12 · Gallery

A corridor that keeps time.

Nine light slots turn the west sun into a ladder on the floor. It shortens as the evening goes, and that is the only clock in the house.

A monolithic travertine kitchen island with a waterfall edge before walnut cabinetry, open to the canopy and pool at dusk.

06 / 12 · Kitchen

The stone starts here.

One travertine plane begins at the island, crosses the glass line, and becomes the table outside without changing thickness.

A stone dining table set beneath a deep canopy beside the pool, the kitchen continuing the same plane indoors.

07 / 12 · Table

Dinner crosses the wall.

A single stone plane begins at the kitchen and continues beneath the canopy outside.

A low platform bed in linen against plaster, a glazed wall open to violet dusk, saguaro and mountains beyond.

08 / 12 · Bedroom

The house turns its back on the road.

Every sleeping room faces east, away from the drive and the last of the sun, so the first thing you get is the morning.

A monolithic travertine soaking tub before a full-height window onto darkening desert, walnut vanity beside it.

09 / 12 · Bath

One block of stone, hollowed.

The tub is cut from the same travertine as the floor it stands on, so the room reads as one piece of ground with a hole in it.

The lit pool held between two wings of the house after dark, an agave in the foreground under deep blue sky.

10 / 12 · Water

The last light stays here.

The pool holds the west light after the plaster has gone quiet.

A dark room lit only by a low fire, the pool and desert reduced to a few warm reflections beyond.

11 / 12 · Afterglow

Then the house disappears.

Rooms recede to a few warm apertures. Waterline and flame finish the path.

The house as long black volumes under a sky dense with stars, the pool a still black mirror holding them.

12 / 12 · Stars

And the desert gets it back.

No fixture on the site points up. The house spends the whole day earning this, and then hands the sky back.

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