Brent Kendle was in a pickle. The architect had potential clients from Wisconsin who hoped to build a getaway for themselves and extended family in Paradise Valley—but if and only if their friend who owned the 1-acre plot they wanted to buy would approve of a design that could preserve the views he cherished from his own adjacent property. Winning the commission meant first winning over the neighbor. “We surveyed everything that we could to figure out exactly where the views were,” Kendle recalls.
The geode-like building that emerged, built by general contractor Greg Hunt, feels as if it rose naturally from the earth, or perhaps from Kendle’s subconscious. “I learned a long time ago that the more I overthink things, the harder they become,” the architect says. “Sometimes you have to let your intuition be the guide.” The site’s constraints shaped everything, including a façade that hides the bustling street behind the house. “It needed to have this kind of protective shell,” he explains. “The home is like a blinder, blocking out the things we don’t want to see and focusing on the things we do.”
While Kendle initially considered copper for the exterior, supply chain realities pushed him toward an attainable look-alike alternative: Kynar, a “metallic coating that should last a hundred years,” the architect says. To offset all that sheen and the minimalist walls of glass, he used custom-milled vertical-grain hemlock in protected areas of the ceiling. “It warms up the space a lot,” Kendle says. “We love modern architecture, but we don’t want it to be cold; we want it to feel cozy.”