ROSA MUERTA
DESIGNED BY ROBERT STONE
Joshua Tree, California
2 Guests / 1 Bedroom / 1 Bed / 1 Bath
From $394 / Night
ARCHITECTURE
Rosa Muerta is a pavilion in the desert that both contrasts and complements its desert location. The house is rooted in modernism, but details are both structural and ornamental with hearts and flowers everywhere. . . and all in shades of black. Chrome columns rise from the dirt to support a ceiling plane with thousands of mirror tiles on the underside. The building includes hand made light fixtures, custom cast block and wrought iron screens, and nail-less construction held together by stainless steel pins and rope connections inspired by traditional Japanese building. It is an entirely custom made architectural experiment that could only happen here and now.
PEOPLE
Robert Stone found interest in the contemporary art ideas of the time and wrote a master thesis proposing an alternate path forward for architecture that wouldn’t retreat to digital abstraction, but instead would move forward analogous to the continually divergent paths of contemporary art using representational and figurative approaches, poetry, and conceptual content unthinkable in the abstract architecture of the time. His early career was spent running very large and complex architecture projects in Los Angeles as a unusually intensive “day job” while developing an art practice with gallery and museum exhibits in LA and NYC and Europe.
PLACE
Though it has all of the luxuries you could want, the raw beauty of the desert climate is the meditative focal point of this house. The concept of “luxury camping” is brought right to the very edge of all out luxury. Inspired by modernist pavilions and the infinite entropy of the desert, this building is incredibly sheltering yet always connected to nature. The house is not heated or air-conditioned but takes advantage of the mild weather with an architecture of walls without roofs, and roofs without walls. It offers luxurious amenities while paradoxically remaining connected in a deep way to the elemental rawness of the desert.
