Desert Architecture Series #11 | Clint Miller | Scottsdale, Arizona

I think the desert is a very pure and somewhat spiritual environment and I really enjoy that about it. I have always loved the desert since I first ever experienced it. I think it comes from the land. I think that it's tough to live in the desert and so the plants and the animals and even the people that live here, you have to sort of boil everything down to essentials. The neighborhood is called Whisper Rock. We're about a dozen miles northeast of the edge of Phoenix. There's a lot of energy as she said. There's a good spirit and this lot, we looked for lots for a year and this lot just felt right for us when we found it. Whisper Rock is a community that does embrace the native natural desert. So all of what has existed here for hundreds of years is embraced. So all of this plant material is protected. So that really creates the culture for this community. We wanted the adobe house for sure and I had always wanted reclaimed wood. So that was part of the deal from the beginning. I was drawn to the aesthetics of it to begin with. I think it's a very real organic feeling surface. I call it my brand-new hundred-year-old house. It has the long front porch which is reminiscent of the old ranch houses. You walk in the foyer, there's a large painting and you can go around either side. What's blocked you is a large fireplace and the fireplace is the centerpiece of the great room. The great room is the one tall room in the house and it's sort of the Great Hall. If we'd been a king and queen that's where our thrones would have been. It is a completely different feeling between night and day in this house. I like both but I have to say I probably like nighttime better. It has a warm glow that comes out at night with the lights and then the dark outside. I've always been intrigued with adobe as a structural component. Meaning that the walls that we see are holding up the roof and to that end we take it a step further. All the beams that we see in this room are supportive. They're actually carrying the roof. You know what we see on both the inside and the outside is the structural system. I love that it's solid, that it feels like it's going to be here for a very long time and hopefully it'll be providing a great home for families for hundreds of years. Well one thing is I like Clint's idea of and I think some of this is even a Frank Lloyd Wright idea that you go into a small space which opens up into a wider space and so we have the vestibules on both of the master bedroom and the front bedroom in the house and you go into this little small vestibule and then you walk into the room and I just wanted it to be not too large a scale and very warm and welcoming. A place that you'd want to spend a lot of time in. I like the master bathroom because I just like the basic design of it and I have a chandelier in there that came from Murano Italy which I really love and that makes the space special to me too. On one corner of the great room is the butler's pantry and I think that shows how old-fashioned we are. We don't have a media room but we have a butler's pantry. It's next to the dining room which is off one corner of the great room and we still like having a real formal dining room with a table and chairs where we can go and sit down and have a holiday dinner occasionally. The kitchen engages the family room and in today's lifestyle the kitchen and especially behind the kitchen island is in my mind like control central. So from that location I think you need to engage the most exciting parts of the architecture. That's where I spend a lot of time, my clients spend a lot of time. We tend to visit with our guests around the island so to me the kitchen island is paramount. When we go in from the great room you go into the combination kitchen and family room and this is of course where we spend all of our time and reflecting again that we wanted a comfortable family home. We have a nice big kitchen, a kitchen table and then you have the the family room with a fireplace and a television and a bar and the doors going out to the backyard and the patios. From the family room kitchen combination there are stairs that go up to my office and I spend my days up there working on photography and trying to ride a little bit. It has a deck looking out over the backyard and the neighborhood golf course. The deck is especially nice at sunset for happy hour when we have those beautiful sunsets. I would like to leave a viewer wanting to see more than to have seen too much of the house or to expose too much of the architecture. So I think it's very important to integrate trees and enlarge canopy trees to soften the edges and leave the viewer wanting to see more. The guest house is exactly for what it sounds like. It's for when we have people come to stay. They can have a separate private place to stay in and be comfortable in. I wanted actually a little bit of a more industrial feel in the guest house so there are some industrial touches in there but it has a little bit of a different decor feel than the main house. I am of the belief that landscape is equally as important as architecture and I've also been accused of saying that it trumps architecture. If the landscaping is well done the project will be a success even with average architecture. The project is far better with the team than if the architect tried to do it all. The team you know jumps in and takes all the bits and dials it up. We knew what we wanted to do years in advance. We brought Clint in the very first step and we had a wonderful time. The whole team was great. The builder was fantastic. The designer was amazingly good but Clint was the was the first part of the team and he just did a wonderful job. His whole approach to the building it was just I don't know it seemed really intuitive, really organic and I felt like he just really got us. He knew what we wanted.