jim jennings

jim jennings, one of my favorite contemporary architects, designed this palm springs vacation house for himself. simply stunning.

this house defines the word retreat for me.

"An eight-foot wall of painted concrete block defines the Jennings house, enclosing 3,000 square feet of space. A flat roof seems to float above the building, just as the entire structure seems to float in the landscape. There is no driveway. You approach across white desert sand, past creosote bush, up to the carport in the north side of the white wall. On a sunny day (Palm Springs normally has more than 350 sunny days a year), light filtering through the carport’s painted-steel trellis roof draws vertical stripes on the horizontal blocks. Then you step from the carport through a clear-anodized-aluminum pivot door into the entrance courtyard and pure astonishment.

From the courtyard you see all the way through the living room to a second courtyard with a lap pool at the far (west) end and a mountain beyond. The east and west walls of the living room are sliding glass doors; on each side, three five-foot-wide panels telescope on separate tracks into a wall recess. (The doors stay entirely open most of the time.) With the privacy afforded by the enclosing wall, Jennings gives new definition to indoor-outdoor living, inverting the idea of 1950s post-and-beam Palm Springs architecture, which was about openness as an extension of the surrounding landscape. The Jennings house is all about enclosure, with the openness inside.

The interior section of the residence occupies just 750 square feet: living room and bedroom separated by an in-line kitchen and a luxuriant bath. 'We simply wanted a space for the two of us,' says Bissell. Another 15-foot set of glass doors opens from the bedroom to the 1,730-square-foot courtyard.

The inspired steel-deck roof, supported by steel beams, sits above clerestories facing north and south that effectively float the roof above the house. Eight-foot overhangs cantilevered to the east and west provide essential shade. From the living room sofa, the owners can see the neighboring mountain both through the clerestory to the south and above the wall of the pool courtyard to the west. 'The emptiness of the pool courtyard intensifies one’s sense of the mountain,' Jennings notes. 'It is a void that works in counterpoint with the solid.'"- AD

as seen in architectural digest

jimjenningsarchitecture.com