Project 1604: A Classic Desert Contemporary
The project started simply. A call to meet two clients and discuss the options for their recently purchased Rancho Mirage, CA. residence. The residence was to be a "retirement" home but remaining static wasn't in their minds. Traveling, going to theatre, volunteering, gardening and entertaining friends would now be front and center in their lives in the desert. Work would now be defined a bit differently than in years past.
The home was 1990's antiquated but with great bone structure. The challenge was how to provide individuality to an interior that was essentially a series of open spaces around a centrally located great room. It took some thought how best to achieve those objectives. And now that the clients are nestled in, we can show you the results of all the efforts.
The dining area of the great room features a classically simple slab table with the ability to open up and seat large groups when the occasion requires. The wall cabinet behind the table creates an important and critical focal point to the entire great room as well as providing lots of storage. Beautiful art and well scaled accessories complete the picture, making the dining area a place to gather, a place to dine, and a place for convivial conversations.
The home was 1990's antiquated but with great bone structure. The challenge was how to provide individuality to an interior that was essentially a series of open spaces around a centrally located great room. It took some thought how best to achieve those objectives. And now that the clients are nestled in, we can show you the results of all the efforts.
The dining area of the great room features a classically simple slab table with the ability to open up and seat large groups when the occasion requires. The wall cabinet behind the table creates an important and critical focal point to the entire great room as well as providing lots of storage. Beautiful art and well scaled accessories complete the picture, making the dining area a place to gather, a place to dine, and a place for convivial conversations.
Art is an important element in any interior and to be effective, pieces must be an appropriate size to the room. But with tall ceilings, art can get lost if it doesn't have the right background. In this solution, two framed etchings are hung over a finely grained silk grass paper to provide texture and contrast. The cabinetry creates a clean frame work that entirely surrounds the art, houses a series of low-voltage adjustable spots and also gives the clients plenty of storage space for dishes, flatware and serving pieces nearby the dining table.
The adjacent media room is open to the great room but for the space to be cozy for watching movies, the design required dividing the space while not closing it off entirely. The solution was two Asian shoji screens. Fabricated in traditional Japanese craftsmanship, the ten foot tall handcrafted panels provide a filtered light into the room and remove glare from the flat panel TV. The cabinet below contains all the electronics neatly tucked away from sight. Floating wall shelves offer the clients a way to display a variety of pottery, containers and vessels from a collection assembled thru the years.
One of the last rooms to be finished in the residence was the sun room. This intimate space gives the clients a place for quiet reading, catching up on the days activities and maybe taking a snooze while remaining closely connected to the outdoors.
The focal point of the interior was created with the acquisition of the art at the La Quinta Art Festival in the spring of 2016. With the art in place, all the other parts and pieces of the room's design would work around the commanding presence of the art.
With two dogs in residence, a supremely butter-smooth faux leather covers the client's two existing chairs and track-arm sofa and makes it easy to maintain. The area rug, made from materials using recycled milk containers, gives the space texture and pulls the sofa and chairs together in a conversation grouping. On a single wall, a commercial wall covering was installed behind the art and replicates a grass paper but without the worries of fading.
Despite the large spaces and tall ceilings, the residence now offers visitors to the home a warm and inviting atmosphere, a very important goal of the clients. The clean and simple modern style of the home's architecture with large expanses of glass is complimentary to the design of the interior spaces. They work as a team and never get in the way of how the rooms were planned to function. And as the clients' designers, we think that this is the definition of contemporary, classic and timeless style.