Inspired by Garcia Lorca’s sol y sombra, the Shadow House was envisioned as a vessel carved from light and shadow. Designed for a couple, whose lives orbit around art and travel, the house poetically cradles sizable art, object and textile collections. Shelves, niches, and ledges unfold throughout the house, offering intimate stages for objects gathered across continents.
Equal parts duende and wabi sabi, the house embodies the soul of America’s oldest Western city, and the Japanese embrace of the rough with the refined. At its heart lies a courtyard: a shallow sloped “pool” lined with stone from an ancient Chinese road. The angled pool captures sunlight and sends it shimmering onto the living room ceiling set to the same pitch, while the sound of cascading water turns the space into a shifting, three-dimensional choreography of light and resonance.
Guests enter the house through integrally colored concrete tower washed in desert light. A single plane of glass forms the canopy at the threshold, while a skylight sends light cascading downward onto a traditional earthen oxblood floor. Steel trellised portals cast shifting shadow patterns across the walls, and the home’s concrete floors echo the oxblood hue. Merging Southwestern courtyard typologies with Asian spacial sensibilities, the house moves between intimacy and openness – pocket courtyards, framed mountain horizons, and rooms tuned to the path of the sun. A refuge of shadow and light, the house becomes a sanctuary weaving objects, stories, and landscape into the tapestry of one couple’s life.
