Joshua Tree Residence by Whitaker Studio
Location: Los Angeles, USA
Status: Ongoing

In the spring of 2017 my client in LA had some friends visiting and, having a little time to spare, they all went on a road trip to visit the client’s plot of land in Joshua Tree. Whilst there, amongst the arid landscape and jutting rocks, one of the friends said, “you know what would look great here?”, before opening her laptop to show everyone a picture she’d seen on the internet. The picture was of an office that I’d designed several years ago but had never been built. And so it came to pass that the next time the client was in London he got in touch and asked to meet up.

Situated on their 90-acre plot, the house is nestled into the rocky mountainside close to the national park. The house is 200m2 or 2000sq.ft. with 3 ensuite bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and an exoskeleton formed out of shipping containers. Each container is orientated to maximise views across the landscape, control light entering the house or use the topography to provide privacy, depending on their individual use. A car garage roofed with solar panels provides power for the house. The client is a film producer with a background in nurturing creative projects to fruition so in many ways the dream collaborator! Construction is scheduled to start on-site later this year.

The original project, that was shown to my client in the spring of 2017, was Hechingen Studio – an office that I designed in 2010. A friend was planning to move back to southern Germany to start an advertising agency with a colleague and they needed an office for their enterprise. They had begun stacking wooden blocks on their kitchen table to plan their future office and asked me to have a look at their plans. Now, I grew up in Liverpool and always associate a stack of shipping containers, as they had planned for their new office, with the docks.

My childhood was spent driving past stacks and stacks of shipping containers awaiting journeys out across the Atlantic. They’re an impressive object in their own right but a stack of them doesn’t really scream, creative-business! So I began thinking about an experiment that we did in school when I was a kid. You put a small grain of salt on the end of a thread of cotton and dangle it into a saline solution. Over the next few days that grain of salt acts as a catalyst and draws the salt from the solution, growing a wonderful crystal. This seemed like a good analogy for an advertising company. Sticking with the containers that my friend had started with I created a design for them that felt befitting a progressive, imaginative agency. Sadly their startup stopped before it started and the office was never built.

more. www.whitakerstudio.co.uk