Situated on a small plateau, with arroyos on either side, “Zacatitos 2” recalls that line from Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat: “I hear that your building your little house deep in the desert. Are you living for nothing now, hope your keeping some kind of record.”
In fact, the house – due for completion in a month’s time – exists largely unrecorded. It has yet to be photographed or published, and remains an off-grid jewel of a design. Its small footprint never imposes but rather embraces the site. A mature palo blanco tree, impossible to transplant, was even incorporated into the design, growing up from the ground through a circular hole in the roof of a courtyard.
The starting point for the house explains Mr. Leckie, was to pare down to the “basic essentials of what was needed for the site and the climate.”
“It was conceived as a singular roof to shade the site,” explains Mr. Leckie, “with integrated deep beams and clerestory windows between them to exhaust out warm air.” The rest of the program followed.
The most dramatic feature of the house is a 600-foot west-facing living area that literally fuses with the landscape, its flooring disappearing into the surrounding rocky outcrop. It is sheltered by a delicately detailed steel frame canopy – a modernist interpretation of the traditional palo darco woven canopies typical of the area (and interwoven here with the steel for a softening effect).
Private spaces like bedrooms and baths, are programmed at the cooler eastern end of the house, while a roof deck opens up to the desert sky.
A third Zacatitos house commissioned by two Canadian couples, was completed this summer and comprises 4,200 square feet of exterior and interior space. It sits on a sandy site that overlooks the ocean, so the main design imperative was one of protection from the elements. Conceived as a series of modular panels, it features one long roof that has various enclosed and open aspects. Designed perpendicular to the view axis of the west facing mountains and the east facing ocean, it features a central living area that opens up onto a pool and provides natural ventilation.
A processional south facing entrance extends some 60 feet before you arrive at the front door. Large open rectangular shafts allow in light that creates patterns that shift with the time of day and position of the sun. The central living space opens up to both the pool and the mountains, perfectly sited for stunning desert sunsets.
As befits a desert environment, the house is very much about balancing the tension between the open and exposed, and the enclosed and protected spaces.
Word of the Campos Leckie homes has spread quickly in the tight knit Los Zacatitos community. Now a fourth house is in the works – a writer’s retreat for a Canadian woman on a rugged knoll with a distant view of the ocean. So far it’s conceived as a bridge that spans the rocky site.
Mr. Campos and Mr. Leckie have developed a special relationship with this place and both feel protective of the ecologically vulnerable area – which could easily be destroyed by over-development.
The designs for their four projects are really architectural homages to the unique sites.
Says Mr. Leckie, “We wanted to respect the wildness of this place.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
