An unadorned black façade echoes the homeowners’ brief but compelling instructions to the architects to design a house like a shadow.
Architect Oller & PejicWhen husband-and-wife architects Monica Oller and Tom Pejic took on this Yucca Valley home, it was with very simple instructions from the homeowners: design a house like a shadow. The result is an ethereal, unexpectedly transparent home nestled above a stunning desert landscape. Situated on a partially graded outcropping with parts of the interior recessed into the rock face, the house reads almost like a cave dwelling. Pejic explains, “The house would replace the missing mountain that was scraped away, but not as a mountain, but a shadow or negative of the rock; what was found once the rock was removed, a hard glinting obsidian shard.”
