Residing Throughout the Joshua Tree Panorama

Casa Azzurra, a newly constructed architectural retreat in Joshua Tree, challenges conventional notions of the desert dwelling, providing a spatial expertise rooted in reminiscence, place, and sensorial immersion. Designed by Mirtilla Alliata di Montereale — an Italian architect raised in Hawaii and educated at SCI-Arc — the venture is deeply private. It attracts on her childhood summers within the Aeolian Islands, skilled collaborations with Frank Gehry and Kulapat Yantrasast, and a reverence for the basic landscapes of Joshua Tree. With a facade of soppy blue, the venture marks the primary in a future hospitality model and a framework for exploring structure as lived narrative.

pictures © Katia Grozov

casa azzurra camouflages with the desert sky

Sprawling throughout ten desert acres in Joshua Tree, Casa Azzurra is organized across the concept of enlargement, each spatially and sensorially. With the design of the retreat, Italian architect Mirtilla Alliata di Montereale doesn’t try to compete with the desert. As a substitute, she leans into it, framing lengthy views and dealing with elevation to create moments of delicate drama. Set on a uncommon slope with views towards the mountain vary of Joshua Tree Nationwide Park, the constructing opens up by sliding glass partitions and think about corridors, permitting the inside to really feel as if it’s respiration with the land. A palette of 5 tonal blues coats the cat-face stucco exterior, designed to shift with the sky. It’s a camouflage that additionally celebrates coloration in a panorama dominated by impartial tones.

Casa Azzurra is a desert retreat in Joshua Tree designed by architect Mirtilla Alliata di Montereale

the cobalt-wrapped courtyard

On the coronary heart of Casa Azzurra, a vivid cobalt-blue courtyard units the tone for the house’s spatial rhythm. Reasonably than following a minimalist desert typology typical of Joshua Tree, Alliata di Montereale leans right into a richer, extra theatrical method — one which honors each vernacular Mediterranean sensibilities and the experimental lineage of Californian structure. The courtyard acts as a hinge between private and non-private realms, a luminous anchor that infuses the encircling rooms with saturated reflections and a way of spatial choreography. This central house embodies the venture’s core ambition: to make structure really feel each grounded and transportive.

the venture attracts inspiration from Aeolian summers, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the encircling desert

The inside embraces texture and chromatic selection with deliberate precision. Jewel-toned bedrooms — every with its personal palette drawn from the architect’s Italian heritage — punctuate the in any other case open and flowing floorplan. These rooms don’t merely beautify however narrate: a dialogue between deep greens, ochres, lapis, and terracotta unfolds by linens, built-ins, and Murano glass accents. Tactile richness defines the ambiance — linen, uncooked wooden, and stone layer into areas which are directly elevated and cozy. Dali prints and skylit rain showers add surrealist touches and moments of intimacy with the pure world, inviting gradual motion and contemplative pause.

the property spans ten acres and is positioned on a uncommon slope with views of Joshua Tree Nationwide Park

Extending outward from the primary residence, Casa Azzurra continues by a collection of architectural interventions. A minimalist visitor retreat sits like a desert observatory, its wood-paneled inside framing the evening sky. Panorama and structure merge in Geoponika’s enclosed backyard, a sanctuary inside a sanctuary, the place desert planting enhances the expertise of enclosure and openness. A thirty-foot pool, bocce and pickleball courts, and an out of doors eating space aren’t facilities within the standard sense — they’re components of a bigger compositional area that encourages motion, gathering, and improvisation. Right here, structure serves life not as backdrop, however as collaborator.

the outside is completed in 5 shades of blue, echoing the altering sky and desert gentle