Atherton Keener House // Phoenix, Arizona.

This post has been sitting in my drafts for ages and ages and ages… and ages… You get the idea. I’ve been admiring this house ever since I found one of the photos on Tumblr almost two years ago. I guess it’s taken me this long to work out how to describe my feelings about it. The design of this home is meticulous, considered and executed with militant precision, so it made me feel like I ought to be describing it with perfectly constructed sentences and grown-up language to match. But that sort of talk just isn’t my style, so it almost made me nervous to write about it.

Anyway! This house in situated in Phoenix, Arizona and it was designed by Jay Atherton and Cy Keener of Atherton Keener as their place of residence and a home of their design studio. What appeals to me the most about this project is the way the architects have used simple and modest materials to create an exquisitely crafted object of beauty. Concrete block, sunshade cloth, concrete floors and drywall construction form the humble kit of parts, all of which were taken to a whole new level in the hands of these capable designers.

“Our interest was in using standard things on a relatively unremarkable site and creating something that was more than the sum of its parts.”

The design process for the house was fairly rigorous and very slow. Atherton Keener were the clients, the builders and the designers. How awesome – slash – what an absolute nightmare! These two young architects opted to make as many things as they could by hand, in order to preserve the design integrity of the house in its entirety. They were committed to accomplishing as much as they could with just a few materials.

“The only things in the house that we purchased were the plumbing fixtures and the appliances. We made all the cabinets—in the bathroom, kitchen, storage closets, and hallways—ourselves, out of plywood that we dyed black.”

“For a while the sinks and tubs were going to be concrete. But it never felt right. In the end we made them by hand, out of marine-grade plywood and marine epoxy resin.”

I realise I am quoting the architects an awful lot in this post, but I am absolutely fascinated with the way their mind works and how they approached the project. One of the strangest things I discovered about the pair is that they chose to forgo some key pieces of furniture. I’m guessing this was because they were so wedded to the spartan aesthetic, and perhaps thought that adding furniture would have messed things up.

“Our friends know that this house lacks a certain amount of comfort, but everyone adapts to what it does have. When people come over to eat, we usually sit on the floor—we keep it really clean—or outside. We’ve all adapted to what it means to not have a dining table.”

“We don’t have a couch. It can be a bit of a problem. Like when we have our girlfriends over it’s hard to make them just sit on the floor or on a chair… One of the nice things about having a girlfriend is, she has a couch at home.”

Seriously, how hardcore are these two? I almost cannot believe anyone would chose to live without a dining table, and especially the sofa (Husband and I did it for 4 months while waiting for our sofa to arrive, and it was pure hell – never again). Strange attitude towards furniture aside, the extraordinary rigour and rasor-sharp architectural details make this one of the most interesting homes I’ve seen in a while. Even if the architects are completely bonkers. But then again, most of them are… (Kidding! But not really.)

[Photos by Ye Rin Mok, via Dwell.]