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The desert's very minimal, urban sprawls have a way of you know information and points of view, becoming part of your daily persona, but when you go into an ultra minimalist almost a survivalist, prehistoric setting, hear the wind you see little bits of plant life and colours and you start to feel a part of it so you often find yourself especially in this house where you're either seeing yourself or you're feeling like you're floating outside of the building, you can't really hide from yourself here so if there's a creative side which everybody's got, let me do something unique for myself.
We were drawn to the desert, this desert Joshua Tree area and we would always come out here and we'd go to 29 Palms on another entrance to the park that was an oasis and there's a few oasis with clusters of these natural palm trees so it was an escape and we go with musicians and other writers and directors and actors.
What's now the 90 acres, it started as 80 but we added 10. I think we were just looking for a place with rocks and it just it came through a friend in the film business, so we're very lucky and then you know we just had to pull it together and do it and it seemed like a no-brainer for us.
Early in the conception of the house when it evolved from just being landscape I'd been working in Venice Beach with Frank Gehry's sub architect and collaborator Tomas Osinski, it was like Tomas we've got to do something out here so I had him come out and all I could think of was like these Mies van der Rohe skyscrapers and he was kind of like the technical palette where I'm like I want an alien sci-fi monolith, no windows, no doors, he came up with this idea like we could get a really small footprint even after we decided to add bedrooms and make it 225 ft long which it is, he figured out a way we would cantilever half the house so it would float over the rocks, if you have a footprint of 2500 ft you're not really stepping on the land that much, in the morning though people think it's like a mirror it's not a mirror and even the bathrooms the sliding doors they spectrally select and what happens is as the light changes it filters the UV and the infrared light so actually in the morning when the sun comes up it starts out black and then it gets like an orange golden thing on one side which is very beautiful.
You can hear the music, you can hear when the sun hits the tip of the house and when it travels down, you could really see a composition of sound, it's pretty dramatic.
The dancing of the light.
I think the big discovery was not to furnish it that everything should be the same color grey match the floors that maybe you don't even see the furniture.
The idea was the pool was an ecosystem so that there would be moisture and you wouldn't dry up being out here cause you do start to feel it a little bit so then they had these glass walls on both sides of the pool and I said no it's a living room just put the pool in the living room because you you're just going to be there living, I don't know why you would break it up so that was one thing, but for me the surprise was of the nighttime, the lighting art pieces that Chris did, horizontal beams of coloured lights and a a vertical ones in the corners and between the the refracting lights as it does at night you just see the colours and it starts to really be just about being a painting, so you have this sense of it being almost a theatre.
