REALM OF THE SENSES.

Based on the typology of the hermetic urban patio dwelling, this house in the suburbs of Phoenix is a sensual fusion of space, light, water and greenery.

Etched into American consciousness is the typology of the villa on a plot, a cultural, social and economic benchmark that continues to induce great swathes of indeterminate sprawl. Space is, paradoxically, the curse of the American suburbs, apparently infinite and endlessly colonizable, but the built outcome of this quantitative latitude is predictably dire. Proposals for densification or adopting urban housing models are understandably slow to take root and have yet to make any discernible impact on the relentless march of subtopia. Phoenix is a case in point. The sublime landscape of the American South West is being slowly corroded by a tide of faux Spanish Colonial dream homes and equally banal commercial development. Building here is frequently reduced to a mechanical exercise in maximizing developers' profits and minimizing architectural imagination.

Wendell Burnette's latest house on the outskirts of Phoenix is a tactful yet firm riposte to the numbing soullessness of suburbia. Commissioned to design a house for a retired aerospace engineer and his wife, Burnette intuitively synthesizes the influences of the desert landscape with his now familiar palette of monolithic geometry and stark materials. The site lies in a dense suburban residential district to the north of the city centre. Here Central Avenue (the main spine of Phoenix) terminates in a culde-sac framed by a narrow canyon. Despite the encroaching flotsam of suburbia, the powerful, elemental presence of the desert topography still prevails. An amphitheatre of craggy ridges gently cradles the site, while sweeping views extend south across the valley floor to the distant backdrop of South Mountain and the Sierra Estrella Range. Behind the site rises a wall of desert vegetation and raw red stone.

The notion of a courtyard house (traditionally an urban model) logically suggested itself as a way of editing the variable context and also as a means of connecting with the landscape by framing particular views. Inspired by vernacular precedents in Morocco and North Africa, which share Arizona's dry desert climate, the Schall House presents an impassively hermetic public face that conceals a serene and secret inner realm animated by water and lush greenery.

Approached from the winding cul-de-sac, the house looms out of its rocky site like a great white ship's hull. A sinuous concrete block wall swells and billows to mimic the double curve of the street, enfolding the domestic compound in a protective embrace. Slots and openings are clinically incised into the wall, apparently at random, but actually thoughtfully placed to frame distant vistas. Each course of reinforced masonry blocks (a signature Burnette material) overlaps with the one beneath, like bands of timber on a hull, adding striation and shadow. The masonry is finished with a thin wash of dove grey mortar, muting imperfection while still revealing the joints below.

The entrance to this suburban ark is carved into the end of the curved wall. A cool, landscaped courtyard, paved with gravel and planted with grape vines greets visitors, animated by the soft splashing of unseen water. Arranged in a rough L-shape around the courtyard, the principal living and sleeping spaces are hoisted up onto a piano-nobile first floor, while the ground level is given over to guest rooms and garages. A single-storey bar of guest rooms runs along the west edge of the site, terminated by a car port. The garage occupies the ground floor of the main two-storey volume, together with a patio and long rectangular pool, enclosed by the compound wall and a rocky outcrop. Beyond an entrance gate of perforated steel, an inner patio forms the house's lush, tranquil heart. Designed for the desert climate (Burnette's wife is a landscape designer specializing in desert vegetation who collaborated with him on this project), it forms a sensual grotto, filled with water, flowers and an Arizona sweet orange tree. A vertical slit cut into the wall siphons breezes across the courtyard, helping to naturally ventilate the internal spaces.

The front door is an ingenious customized lift (one of the clients has hip problems) made from curved perforated stainless-steel panels put together with a jeweller's eye for precision. Capturing a slice of sky like a James Turrell installation, light percolates down through the glazed top of the ovoid lift shaft. A languidly curving stair paved in Mexican cantero blanco stone leads up from the inner courtyard, following the warp of the external wall. The main upper floor is a sequence of luminous, airy spaces, with austere white walls and timber floors made of salvaged maple planks. Suspended over the courtyard with a full-height glass wall overlooking the pool below, the living room forms the prow of the ship. Dining and living area are contained in a single intermediate space, with the master bedroom placed on the less public west side. Throughout the house, the position and size of each window is carefully calculated to frame a particular view of desert, mountain or sky. Arriving by lift, for instance, y ou are confronted by a long, horizontal slit encapsulating a postcard vista of the South Mountain and distant Sierra Estrella, with no distracting suggestion of the surrounding sprawl.

Through Burnette's perceptive concern for the intimacies of space and placemaking that also resonates with the landscape, the Schall House is an extraordinarily lyrical interpretation of the suburban villa typology. Hermetic on the outside, yet with a rich internal dynamic of space, nature and light, it is a modern oasis in a desert.

Burnette relates the story of a neighbour who on seeing the house with its Moroccan-inspired enclosing wall, told him it reminded him of his honeymoon in Marrakech. The neighbour describes his experience: 'We arrived at the airport, got a taxi, wound through the narrow streets and arrived at this giant wall. said to the taxi driver "this can't be the place"; the taxi driver said "oh, no, this is the place". We knocked on the single door, the porter answered and beyond the door was heaven'.