Desert Palisades-97 is a 3,791 square foot residential project located on the outskirts of Palm Springs, California. 

With the San Jacinto mountains directly Southwest of the site, and views of downtown Palm Springs to the Northeast, the project maintains a connection to the city while remaining secluded. The client’s vision for the project was rooted in simplicity, sophistication, and livability. They prioritized seamless indoor-outdoor living, natural light, and subtle material elegance. The program evolved to support their family’s needs, including spaces flexible enough to serve as both children’s rooms and workspaces, all while maintaining a refined architectural character. The project has a strong orthogonal organization, with a series of parallel concrete walls that break up the spaces in plan and double as view-framing planes three-dimensionally. DP-97 is a 3-bedroom, 3.5-bathroom home, including a customized “bunk room”, with an integrated bunk bed. Gathering spaces are centralized in the design, with the living area providing a metaphorical bridge from the more “public” areas of the entry and kitchen to the more “private” areas of the bedrooms, as well as from the interior to exterior. As the living area is flanked on either side by large, operable windows that allow for a continuous connection between the pool courtyard and the outdoor firepit area. Meanwhile, the private spaces are more secluded but maintain a strong connection to nature with operable glass walls that provide views into the vast desert and dissolve the building envelope. Moreover, the admiration of nature throughout this project is more than just an appreciation of aesthetics, as central to the design intent was sustainability. The use of concrete walls plays a crucial role in passive temperature. In Palm Springs’ desert climate, concrete absorbs daytime heat and slowly releases it during cooler nights, reducing reliance on mechanical cooling systems. Additionally, large overhangs define transitional outdoor rooms and provide vital shade, enhancing physical comfort and encouraging year-round outdoor use. Lastly, the operable windows that allow for a seamless indoor-outdoor connection double as a means for cross ventilation, further providing passive cooling for the project.

Project Specs:

Just as with architectural expression, the expression of materials in DP-97 is subdued and intentional. The relationship of envelope is constantly being interrogated through the architectural language. The exterior of the project is constructed of three main elements; concrete, stucco, and glass. While the interior is constructed of warmer textures, such as wood. The exception being at the entryway, with the wooden door being flanked on one side by a wood-siding wall which extends from the exterior into the interior. Conversely, a series of typical cast-in-place concrete walls that break up the spaces in plan and double as view-framing planes three-dimensionally. Two of these walls inform the entryway experience by enclosing the entrance and wood-siding wall from street view. Overlapping, floating concrete steps lead from the base of the hill at street level up to the entry way, the entire time placing these concrete walls as the central focus of the experience. Concrete steps also lead from the patio area just outside the kitchen down into an outdoor dining area.

This dining area fully takes advantage of the difference in grading height, with an integrated bench and dining table at patio-height. This dining area is directly adjacent to a centralized pool which acts as a courtyard to the project and becomes the uniting focus. This pool is interrupted at one edge by a planter integrated at level with an adjoining patio area. This patio area directly abuts the interior living area and acts a secondary gathering space. Roughly ten foot high operable windows with a roughly thirty-one foot run on each side of the living room open up fully into this patio area, which serves to integrate exterior space into the interior. This constant blurring of envelope and use of the terrain to blur the ground plane reinforce the intention behind the project.