Inside a Breathtaking Desert Mansion That Looks Like A Fossil | Unique Spaces | Architectural Digest

[Music] foreign [Music] design in this house it's not my preferred style it is my style it's my vocabulary my shapes and also that's informed by the bones that Ken gave me it's a reaction to the shapes that he laid down over the years it's still changing and growing it is almost like a living object [Music] oh my name is John Bucker and I'm the interior designer and fabricator on the Kellogg Doolittle project it was built for Bev and Jay Doolittle and the architectus Kendrick Banks Kellogg I would describe Ken Kellogg as really underestimated genius construction

started in 89. I came to the house in 1994. I've been at the house so many years and for such a long period of time I feel like the house is a part of me like it's my identity Jay Doolittle would always tell me I don't care how long it takes or how much it costs I just want you to do your best work the new owner Scott Leonard and I are continuing with basically the same relationship where you don't get carte blanche but it's the best next thing to it the terrain this house is

situated on is ten and a half acres and it butts out to the Joshua Tree National Forest I'm sure when Ken saw the starkness and the beauty when he came out here it inspired him to do these shapes the original owner of the house Jay was fascinated by fossils every other week when I arrived he would have another book on fossils for me so I tried to incorporate a lot of vertebrae type motifs the whole time I was building it I had a pair of headphones on and I was listening to Miles and Monk and

Coltrane I disliked the repetition in jazz but the whole thing forms another bigger picture so it's what I try to do with my shapes foreign on this side is 14 columns and on that side is 12 columns and you can see that they don't touch there's close to a thousand panes of glass up there another challenging thing on this project is everything is coming up a golf cart path every piece of glass that you see in the house some of them are 10 foot 12 foot high and five feet wide and weighs 600 pounds just

getting things physically moved around here is really difficult [Music] [Laughter] Ben Doolittle was a painter and she used these two tables here to do her artwork on and now there is for dining tables and entertainment originally they weren't supposed to touch the ground at any point but when the structure was done and if you took your finger and just touched it it would just vibrate so I ended up putting these parts that come up to hold the glass I lived in Carrara Italy where this marbles from and I had a thin piece of it leaned

up against a window and I saw the light passing it through it and it reminded me of alamaster which they used to make lamb Shades out of and the shape is inspired by the early Sputnik satellites that the Russians put into orbit if you see these things in the dark Building looks like they're floating like stars in the sky because I was working on this house well into the evening I knew how dark it was when it came time to make the structure here I decided to turn it into a lighting fixture that could light

up the whole house it was kind of inspired by a skeleton that's been bleached out of the sea urchin it's got that kind of shade and it's got the little ridges on it I always thought those were kind of pretty this is one of nine exterior doors each door has to hit one column but it has to go to the other so in order for the door to function I needed at least one straight edge then all the handles each one is individually made each door has its own Motif for the etched glass the frosted

glass reads as kind of a mint green to me and there's a lot of plants out in the desert that have that same silvery green Tull this Stone structure you see was a planter it had Cactus and plants in it and Scott said he didn't need another planter but he would love a bar once again we have the kind of spinal column thing with the ribs coming off there's 360 of these ribs and they articulate to form kind of another shape so if you've ever had a drink standing around that planter it's just not as

great foreign Doolittle had an Apple computer and it was clear plastic greenish I made the deaths to match the computer originally all the light switch plates in the whole house Were Made for This Old School analog type light switch when Scott moved in and he wanted to update the lighting system this is one of the only remaining one and we're hoping in the future when we have a little bit more time to make new switch covers the Doolittles were kind of introverted people so they never thought that they would need more than four chairs at

their dining table it's cantilevered Foley on a steel tube it passes through the column and continues out to the exterior dining table I like the orange color of the Rosa Verona because in a lot of the concrete there are similar colored stones related to the tone of this this is the living realm uh it has a fireplace when Ken and I were designing it he did this concrete shell and I did this portion I was kind of thinking one of those sea creatures I think it's called an otolus from when I was designing this I

bent the stairs up to continue under this concrete shell and I think it works pretty well Jay the original owner he used to like to go hiking in the canyons down in South Palm Springs and he really likes the River Rocks we use these in the bathroom and this is just a continuation [Music] the entrance to this Wing is kind of our launch to Frank Lloyd Wright who used to like to compress you into a tiny space and then when you get through it gets voluminous Scott was wanting another bedroom so we decided to build

this bed it's the biggest thing I've ever built as far as a piece of furniture originally Scott was thinking that it would be more of a Gathering Place than a bedroom like a bunch of friends could get on here he likes it so much now that it's used as his primary bedroom foreign this is the primary bathroom this is a bronze his and her sink I really Let It Go on this one I didn't hold back I couldn't tell you what the design for this is inspired by it was more of just a process of

drawing and drawing and drawing until I came up with a shape I liked in order to get this up here it weighs so much we made a wheel out of a round circle out of plywood put the sink in it and rolled it from the driveway all the way up here [Music] this is a primary bedroom it's if you see here this is the lighting fixture that you saw before that that's where we are we're on top of that the bed is situated to look out uh the clear story and it's really beautiful at night

to see all the stars the Doolittles were really into books so they wanted as many books as possible to fit in here the woods sat for six years in the garage on stickers to dry out and then I put it together when these were made these reveals were the thickness of a dime and you can see that even though these have 11 coats of automotive finish on them what was the thickness of a dime is now almost 3 8 of an inch you can see how much wood shrinks in the desert nowadays you can't buy

this automotive finish on This is highly toxic stuff from the 80s this really is a guest bedroom that kind of feels to me like a little cathedral in here has a different feel from the rest of the house if you have the choice between cantilevering cannot cantilevering I always choose to count later so this desk is cantilever the bed here has shelves the marble was in the form of a huge block about the size of a small car and every piece of marble in here came out of the same Rock we still haven't completed the

house so this is one of those details I just Jimmy rigged something and these still have to be fabricated this is the guest's bathroom and it's one of my favorite rooms in the house I don't know what I was thinking but I just went crazy with the marble and I fabricated these sinks in cabinets I just love the shapes and the volumes when I was in college there was a Furniture maker there it's really famous named Jack Hopkins and he taught me to make furniture by stacking wood and then I took his technique and transferred

it to Marble um the columns all go down into the ground approximately 14 feet the placement of the house was totally up to can it just goes to show you his genius though that it's one thing to be looking at a topographical map but it blows your mind to try to think about how you could place a building in a massive Boulders it's almost Beyond imagination how his mind works one of the main premises that the interior and exterior become one as much as possible the house floor begins at the street and flows through the

whole house the material for it came from a rock slide it's an exact match in material and color for the boulders that are in the house the boulders just flow right through the floor out into the landscape I think this house will be around forever because of the choice of materials it's basically Stone that's been ground up and put back together I'm a little bothered sometimes by the label of organic architecture one influence that I never talked about through my whole career was abstract expressionist painting and you have like Jackson Pollock and you have Mark

rothko and they're just completely different to me I would just say this is like Ken's thing like Ken's an artist I don't know if trying to put a label on it really helps to describe what it is [Music] okay foreign austerity to it but on the same token I think because of the choice of materials it feels really warm inside the house to me but it still has a little bit of edge to it which I really like when you have people in this space it is great it is really wonderful even though it was

never made for entertaining it's the perfect spot to entertain my work on the house has taught me everything about designing and fabricating especially in recent years has taught me to be more social enjoy showing it to people and so I feel really good about that this house comes as close as anything could be to the feeling you get from like looking at a mark rothko painting or listening to John Coltrane I hope he gets that feeling foreign