High Desert Retreat by Aidlin Darling Design
The inception of the High Desert Retreat project, situated on a rocky plateau above the Coachella Valley, is rooted in reverence to its natural surroundings.
Aidlin Darling Design bridges the demands of artistic endeavor, environmental responsibility, functional pragmatics, and financial considerations. As a multidisciplinary firm, we believe that innovations discovered through the process of design and construction can be applied to projects of any scale, use, or purpose.
Partners Joshua Aidlin and David Darling have cultivated a team that strives to deliver the highest level of project management, service, and design. Our approach is client and site specific, and questions conventional assumptions. A collaborative process with clients, consultants, fabricators, and builders allows an open and impassioned exploration and enables a clear understanding of appropriate solutions. In each project, we seek to uncover an inherent spirit of place and interpret constraints as catalysts for performative design. The individual character of each project emerges through poetic spatial relationships, material richness, and exacting detail.
LOCATION: San Francisco, California
LEARN MORE: aidlindarlingdesign.com
The inception of the High Desert Retreat project, situated on a rocky plateau above the Coachella Valley, is rooted in reverence to its natural surroundings.
Situated on a sloping site in the Santa Lucia Preserve, an ecological preserve in the Carmel Valley hills, this house is both responsive and respectful towards its environment in a community that emphasizes the preservation of natural and scenic resources and living in harmony with nature.
The owners proposed LEED Platinum certification and Net Zero Energy for House of Earth and Sky. With that as a starting point, the project strove to integrate ecological responsibility holistically into the design, such that sustainability performance and architectural expression become one inseparable whole.
San Francisco-based Aidlin Darling Design recently completed Mill Valley Courtyard House. The site for this residence is a typical suburban lot not unlike any other in Northern California.