The desert always wins. Brett Woods and Joseph Dangaran, partners in the Los Angeles–based architecture firm Woods + Dangaran, repeatedly underscore that idea—the inexorable force of the desert’s climate and terrain—in discussing the unconventional Palm Springs weekend home they designed for Woods’s young family. In terms of form, siting, and materials, every decision the architects made was calculated in response to the exigencies of the house’s boulder-strewn lot, the views of the nearby San Jacinto Mountains and valley floor, and, naturally, the relentless sunshine that bakes the desert oasis.
“We always refer to this as the anti–Palm Springs house, which we say with love. The midcentury-modern movement is so revered here, so crucial to the cultural identity of the city, that it becomes the defining feature of what people think Palm Springs was, is, and always should be,” Woods says. “This house is less about being in Palm Springs than it is about the specific context of the hillside and the boulders. We wanted to explore that relationship without reference to the Rat Pack or pink flamingos,” he adds.
The house sits gently on its sloping site, anchored to the hill by the garage on the mountain-facing side yet floating above the land on the side that faces the valley. From the approach, the front volume reads like a discrete Miesian pavilion, unencumbered by overhangs and other shade structures. The living room, dining area, kitchen, children’s bedrooms, and primary bedroom suite are all arrayed within that elongated rectangular structure. A glass bridge connects the slender block to guest quarters and ancillary spaces at the rear of the property.
“There are arroyos on the site that have been there for thousands of years. The house is lifted so that the two predominant arroyos both slip under the structure,” Dangaran explains. “We wanted to respect the land, so the structure touches down as delicately as possible. We had to remove massive boulders during construction, but afterward we moved them back into place. Basically, we put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”