Situated on the outskirts of Joshua Tree National Park is the futuristic Kellogg Doolittle House. While there’s no physical indication of the boundary line – no gate or fence surrounding the property – you’ll find the Doolittle House is protectively wrapped within its own kind of organic enclosure. Built not merely among but quite literally into the terrain of the desert mountains, the nearly 5,000-square-foot house is something of a mammoth, even among the immense boulders that both surround it and make up some of its walls. Nonetheless, owner Scott Leonard can point out the exact spot where his property ends and the park begins.
Leonard first came across the home in the early 2000s, having read about it in a newspaper article. “I remember seeing photos and it took my breath away,” Leonard tells Hypebeast. “I never thought I would see it in person or own it.” Construction on Kellogg Doolittle House had begun some 20 years earlier in 1984 after its creator Kendrick Bangs Kellogg – a disciple of organic architecture pioneer Frank Lloyd Wright – received the commission from artist Bev Doolittle and her husband Jay.
Over the ensuing twenty years, Kellogg and designer John Vugrin labored over the home – collaborating on structural elements such as the 26 curved columns that rise up from the mountains and fan out like a rib cage, to intricate details like pebble-floored shower and a specially-commissioned circular bed in the master bedroom.
When he signed on to the decade-spanning project in 1988, Vugrin was just 21 years old and living in San Diego – approximately a three-hour drive from the site. By then, he had already assisted Kellogg in a few big projects, including constructing furniture for the architect’s Hoshino Stone Chapel in Nagano, Japan.
Recalling his first encounter with the property, the house was then still in a bare-bones state. “The rough columns were up but they weren’t plastered,” Vugrin says. “I looked at the plans for the doors and all the fixtures and simply I started building all the things for it.”
