-3-(1).jpg "A Sublime Example of Organic Architecture in Joshua Tree")
A Sublime Example of Organic Architecture in Joshua Tree
The Doolittle house should theoretically be hard to miss. Designed by architect Kendrick Bangs Kellogg in the 1980s, the 4,643-square-foot home rises up out of the California desert like an arachnid, its stony spines hovering in the landscape like a UFO just about to settle down. It should also theoretically feel menacing. Yet the house is both discreet and, once you’re inside, surprisingly cozy. It was these factors that attracted writer Kristopher Dukes and her Facebook executive husband Matt Jacobson to it when they first came to view it in 2015. “It looked like a desert mirage,” reflects Dukes. “I couldn’t believe that something so radical and beautiful could actually be built.”
A disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, architect Kellogg made his name in the 1960s and ’70s for creating sculptural homes that ranged in inspiration from lotuses to onions to caterpillars in the way they dramatically unfolded on the landscape around them. With its 26 cast-concrete vertebrae that rise up as columns and then fan out to create a roof, this house is one of his most major masterpieces. It was commissioned by artist Bev Doolittle and her husband Jay in 1984. With interior designer John Vugrin working in conjunction on almost every single detail, it took 20 years to complete.
The house is resolutely open to the outside world, allowing its residents, Kristopher Dukes and Matt Jacobson, to watch the light continuously shift throughout the day. “You feel like it’s the Platonic ideal of how to live naturally,” says Dukes.
