Desert Light and Mountain Silence: Inside An A-Frame Above the World, Mountain Center, California

There is a stretch of the Pines to Palms Highway where the mountain forest opens without warning and the desert valley appears below — amber, vast, and completely still. The first time you see it, you stop the car. You stand at the edge of the road and look at it for longer than you expected to. The distance does something to the nervous system that is difficult to explain and impossible to replicate indoors.

Adele and Carlo stood at this spot and understood immediately what the second home would have to do.

Not perch at the edge of the view. Live inside it.

The Arrival

An A-Frame Above the World sits within the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto National Monument, on a hillside above Mountain Center, surrounded on all sides by protected wilderness. The approach is unhurried — a road that narrows as it climbs, the desert valley dropping away to the south, snow-dusted peaks rising to the north. By the time the A-frame comes into view, rising from its hillside with the quiet structural confidence of a building that has always been here, you have already begun to decompress.

The orientation is north-facing by deliberate choice. Sunrise and sunset arrive not from in front but from the side, casting long light across the façade and into the interior throughout the day — a continuous, shifting play of shadow and warmth that Adele describes with the ease of someone who has spent considerable time watching it.

"The desert house — the house looks north, so the sun is either on your right or your left, and when the light is on the side it creates all these shadows. It's the perfect angle." — Carlo

"The views just change all day. The light changes all day. You could just sit there and it's entertaining to watch the view change." — Adele

The Living Room and Kitchen

The A-frame structure rises to thirty feet at its apex, and the interior holds all of that height. Floor-to-ceiling glass fills the southern face, pulling the desert valley directly into the room — the Palm Desert floor glowing below, the mountain peaks pressing in from above, open sky in every direction. To stand in this living room is to feel genuinely elevated, genuinely apart.

The open-plan kitchen, dining, and living area flows as a single space without partition or corridor — a design decision rooted, as in the mountain house, in the belief that the kitchen is where a stay begins and where it tends to end. A custom solid oak dining table anchors the room: eight seats, warm grain, built with the kind of quiet solidity that invites people to linger. Every room has a desk, because Adele and Carlo understand that a workcation is only as good as the setting can sustain — and this one sustains it completely.

"One thing that I love about Japanese architecture is how purposeful it is. There's never an inch of space wasted." — Carlo

The kitchen arrives fully stocked and equipped, the espresso machine included. The pantry is ready before you are. The record collection — built over years, brought here from their own shelves — sits by the player.

"We have an incredible record collection in one house and a CD collection in the other. We have plenty of books that we sourced — mostly our books, actually, that we've read — so they both feel quite personal." — Carlo

The Bedrooms

Four rooms, four entirely different experiences of light and landscape.

The master loft occupies the apex of the A-frame, tucked beneath the highest point of the roofline with a private spa — egg-shaped soaking tub, rainfall shower, infrared sauna in warm timber — conceived as a flowing sequence rather than a bathroom, an onsen arrangement where the boundary between bathing, resting, and looking out at the desert is deliberately softened. From the loft bed, the view extends south across the valley floor to the horizon.

The Lavender Room faces east onto a 400-square-foot private patio — a room that is essentially two rooms, the indoor space and the terrace being equally usable and equally considered. Morning light arrives here first. The Sage Room places the desert at the centre of every angle, its window positioned with the same precision as every other aperture in the house — not to fill a wall, but to frame a specific moment of the view. A fourth room with custom-built bunks is sized generously enough for adults who don't want to feel like they've been given the children's room.

The Cinema Room

Downstairs, away from the light, a cinema room with a 135-inch screen and a professional JVC 4K projector with full surround sound. The contrast with the view-saturated rooms above is intentional — a space of deliberate enclosure, where the outside world is set aside in favour of something else entirely. It is, in the logic of the house, the only room that isn't about the landscape.

Three Landscapes at the Door

What makes this home exceptional beyond its design is its position. Idyllwild — an artists' colony with independent galleries, a summer jazz festival, and the particular unhurried feeling of a town that has refused to become anything other than what it is — is twenty minutes up the mountain. Palm Springs, thirty minutes south, offers mid-century modern architecture of genuine cultural significance, world-class spa culture, and the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway: a ten-minute gondola ascent from desert floor to alpine wilderness that remains one of the most quietly extraordinary transitions in nature anywhere in California. Joshua Tree National Park — otherworldly rock formations, ancient trees, and some of the darkest skies in the American West — is less than an hour east.

The A-frame sits at the intersection of all three. Guests who arrive for one tend to stay for all of them.

On Leaving

The thing about this house is what happens to your sense of time inside it. Mornings extend. Evenings resist ending. The light does not let you rush. Adele and Carlo built both their homes with this in mind — not as a feature, but as a fundamental purpose.

"They'll be taken care of by us throughout the booking, and the nature will do the rest. People come here to switch off and connect with their family. They leave inspired and feeling regenerated." — Adele

The Pine Mountain Club Treehouse — Adele and Carlo's first home, forty minutes north in the forest of Pine Mountain Club — offers the same design intelligence in a mountain rather than a desert setting. Read about the Treehouse →

The full story of how both homes came to be, and the design studio that grew from them: Studio Japandy and the Long Way Round →

Book directly with Adele and Carlo through Locèlle — fee-free, fully transparent, and with a direct line to the people who know every corner of this place.

Book An A-Frame Above the World →

Photography provided by Adele and Carlo