Explore An Arizona Abode Where Windows Become Sculptural Forms
Architecture firm Kendle Design Collaborative came together with Wiseman & Gale Interiors, GM Hunt Builders and Colwell Shelor Landscape Architecture to create this eye-popping Paradise Valley home.
When designing this striking ground-up home overlooking Camelback Mountain, Scottsdale-based architect Brent Kendle knew that the many expansive panes of glass would play an essential role in the project’s overall aesthetic. “It’s a very minimalist statement,” Kendle says of the Paradise Valley, Arizona, retreat, whose brief called for sculptural architecture, an uninterrupted indoor-outdoor flow, and above all, a strong sensory connection to the landscape.
To achieve this trifecta with a visual weightlessness befitting the modern build, Kendle employed Fleetwood Windows & Doors, whose designs are defined by minimal seams and colossal scale. “The mullions are super thin so that there’s less metal visible, which creates more transparency to enjoy the views,” Kendle elaborates. In this particular home, “each panel of glass is probably somewhere between 900 and 1,100 pounds,” he adds, noting that while those in the great room are motorized, elsewhere they are engineered to be effortlessly pocketed away by hand—a true design feat.
The vast fenestration maximizes every centimeter of the mountain-facing rear facade, but Kendle also used the windows to immerse the clients within more intimate architectural gestures, such as at the core of the home, where he designed a double-height gallery surrounding a pocket garden to bridge the public and private wings. Overhead, in a stroke of desert magic, an oculus cut in the shape of a geode sheds light on a centuries-old ironwood tree that was carefully relocated here by Colwell Shelor Landscape Architecture.
The finished result is a one-of-a-kind sanctuary where the windows all but disappear, reading as unobtrusive and delightful as a soft breeze through Echo Canyon. “There’s a very spare footprint in the way the panes meet the ground in that there’s almost no track exposed,” says the architect. “So again, it fosters that indoor-outdoor lifestyle and minimizes the separation between exterior and interior.” Perfect in a setting where the views arrive as if in widescreen.
