Badwood Ranch is a 1,200 square foot single-family home set in the heart of California’s beautiful High Desert region. The inspiration for the design came from the beauty and the harshness of the surrounding desert site, while trying to stay within a very constrained budget.

The project’s barebones materials palette, consisting of stucco, telephone poles, and Douglas fir, is typical of the surrounding ranch-like neighborhood context. Telephone poles are a common construction material at ranches, but seldom applied to dwellings themselves. In this project, the poles allow the trellis to cost-effectively reach 25 feet high into the air, creating multi-level outdoor spaces to celebrate the beautiful desert setting.

With a modest budget of $350k, the design of the house needed to be kept simple, which led to a minimalist design approach and a focus on outdoor living spaces. The floor plan of the house is “Y” shaped, which was driven by the location of the former structure’s foundation footprint, as well as the desire for each wing of the house to have unobstructed desert views in every direction. The “Y” shape frames an existing Joshua Tree on site, which becomes the centerpiece of the house.