XTEN

Monika Haefelfinger and Scott Utterstrom of Swiss firm XTEN had a natural starting point for this home. “At our first visit to the site we fell in love with the Santa Rosa Mountains that provide the backdrop for La Quinta, California. This established our two primary goals for the project: Highlighting the spectacular view of the mountains by creating as much transparency as possible and creating a palpable link between the materiality of the house and the majestic mountains beyond.”

The pair were masterful in their balance of the technical and aesthetic with this home, which is “configured to protect against extreme sun and strong desert winds in one direction, while creating a series of free-flowing indoor-outdoor spaces opening to the landscape. The project was conceived as a series of freestanding volumes beneath and between projecting horizontal slabs. The freestanding volumes in stone, concrete and oak are spaced and configured to create the different scales of indoor-outdoor space that flow between them.”

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XTEN project in La Quinta

Photography: Jeremy Bitterman

XTEN project in La Quinta

Photography: Jeremy Bitterman