Inside a Breathtaking Desert Mansion That Looks Like A Fossil

[calm gentle music]

The interior design in this house,

it's not my preferred style it is my style,

it's my vocabulary, my shapes,

and also that's informed by the bones that Ken gave me.

It's a reaction to the shapes that he laid down.

Over the years, it's still changing and growing.

It is almost like a living object.

[calm gentle music]

[gentle music]

My name's John Vugrin.

I'm the interior designer

and fabricator on the Kellogg Doolittle Project.

It was built for Bev and Jay Doolittle

and the architect is Kendrick Bangs Kellogg.

I would describe Ken Kellogg

as really underestimated genius.

Construction started in 89.

I came to the house in 1994.

I've been at the house so many years.

And for such a long period of time,

I feel like the house is a part of me,

like it's my identity.

Jay Doolittle would always tell me,

I don't care how long it takes or how much it costs

I just want you to do your best work.

The new owner Scott Leonard and I

are continuing with basically the same relationship where

you don't get carte blanche,

but it's the best next thing to it.

[calm gentle music]

The terrain this house is situated on is 10 1/2 acres

and it butts up to the Joshua Tree National Forest.

I'm sure when Ken saw the starkness

and the beauty when he came out here,

it inspired him to do these shapes.

The original owner of the house, Jay,

was fascinated by fossils.

Every other week when I arrived

he would have another book on fossils for me.

So I tried to incorporate a lot of vertebrae type motifs.

The whole time I was building it

I had a pair of headphones on

and I was listening to Miles and Monk and Coltrane.

I just liked the repetition in jazz,

but the whole thing forms another bigger picture.

So it's what I try to do with my shapes.

[calm gentle music]

The building on this side is 14 columns

and on that side is 12 columns.

And you can see that they don't touch.

There's close to 1,000 panes of glass up there.

Another challenging thing on this project is,

everything is coming up a golf cart path.

Every piece of glass that you see in the house

some of 'em are 10 foot, 12 foot high and five feet wide

and weigh 600 pounds.

Just getting things physically moved around here

is really difficult.

[calm gentle music]

Bev Doolittle was a painter

and she used these two tables here to do her artwork on

and now they're used for dining tables and entertainment.

Originally, they weren't supposed

to touch the ground at any point,

but when the structure was done

and if you took your finger and just touched it,

it would just vibrate.

So I ended up putting these parts

that come up to hold the glass.

I lived in Carrara, Italy where this marble's from.

And I had a thin piece of it leaned up against a window

and I saw the light passing through it

and it reminded me of Alamaster,

which they used to make lamp shades out of.

And the shape is inspired by the early Sputnik satellites

that the Russians put into orbit.

If you see these things in the dark building

looks like they're floating like stars in the sky.

[calm gentle music]

Because I was working on this house

well into the evening, I knew how dark it was.

When it came time to make the structure here,

I decided to turn it into a lighting fixture

that can light up the whole house.

It was kind of inspired by a skeleton

that's been bleached out of the sea urchin.

It's got that kind of shade.

And it's got the little ridges on it.

I always thought those were kind of pretty.

[calm gentle music]

This is one of nine exterior doors.

Each door has to hit one column,

but it has to go to the other.

So in order for the door to function

I needed at least one straight edge.

Then all the handles, each one is individually made.

Each door has its own motif for the etched glass.

The frosted glass reads, its kind of a mint green to me

and there's a lot of plants out in the desert

that have that same silvery green tone.

This stone structure you see was a planter.

It had cactus and plants in it.

And Scott said he didn't need another planter,

but he would love a bar.

Once again, we have the kind of spinal column thing,

with the ribs coming off.

There's 360 of these ribs and they articulate

to form kind of another shape.

So if you've ever had a drink standing around a planter,

it's just not as great.

[calm piano music]

Bev Doolittle had an Apple computer

and it was clear plastic greenish.

I made the desk to match the computer.

Originally all the light switch plates in the whole house

were made for this old school analog type light switch.

When Scott moved in,

and he wanted to update the lighting system.

This is one of the only remaining one

and we're hoping in the future

when we have a little bit more time

to make new switch covers.

The Doolittles were kind of introverted people.

So they never thought that they would need

more than four chairs at their dining table.

It's cantilevered fully on a steel tube.

It passes through the column

and continues out to the exterior dining table.

I like the orange color of the Rosa Verona

because in a lot of the concrete

there are similar colored stones

related to the tone of this.

This is the living room.

It has a fireplace.

When Ken and I were designing it,

he did this concrete shell and I did this portion.

I was kind of thinking one of those sea creatures

I think it's called a Nautilus.

When I was designing this,

I bent the stairs up to continue

under this concrete shell and I think it works pretty well.

Jay, the original owner

he used to like to go hiking in the canyons

down in South Palm Springs

and he really likes the river rocks.

We use these in the bathroom

and this is just a continuation.

[calm gentle music]

The entrance to this room is kind of our homage

to Frank Lloyd Wright who used to like

to compress you into a tiny space

and then when you get through it gets volumous.

Ms. Scott was wanting another bedroom,

so we decided to build this bed.

It's the biggest thing I've ever built

as far as a piece of furniture.

Originally, Scott was thinking that it would be

more of a gathering place than a bedroom.

Like a bunch of friends can get on here.

He likes it so much now that I used as his primary bedroom.

This is the primary bathroom.

This is the bronze his and her sink.

I really let it go on this one. I didn't hold back.

I couldn't tell you what the design for this is inspired by.

It was more of just a process

of drawing and drawing and drawing

until I came up with a shape I liked.

In order to get this up here, it weighs so much.

We made a wheel out of round circle, out of plywood,

put the sink in it

and rolled it from the driveway all the way up here.

[gentle calm music]

This is a primary bedroom.

If you see here,

this is the lighting fixture that you saw before.

That's where we are. We're on top of that.

The bed is situated to look out the clear story

and it's really beautiful at night to see all the stars.

The Doolittles were really into books.

So they wanted as many books as possible to fit in here.

The wood sat for six years in the garage

on stickers to dry out and then I put it together.

When these were made,

these reveals were the thickness of a dime.

And you can see that even these have 11 coats

of automotive finish on 'em.

What was the thickness of a dime

is now almost 3/8 of an inch.

and you can see how much wood shrinks in the desert.

Nowadays, you can't buy this automotive finish.

This is highly toxic stuff from the 80s. [chuckles]

This room is a guest bedroom,

that kind of feels to me like a little cathedral in here,

has a different feel from the rest of the house.

If you have the choice

between cantilevering and not cantilevering

I always choose to cantilever.

So this desk is cantilevered.

The bed here has shelves.

The marvel was in the form of a huge block

about the size of a small car.

And every piece of marble in here came out of the same rock.

We still haven't completed the house,

so this is one of those details.

I just Jimmy rigged something

and these still have to be fabricated.

This is the guest bathroom

and it's one of my favorite rooms in the house.

I don't know what I was thinking,

but I just went crazy with the marble

and I fabricated these sinks and cabinets.

I just love the shapes and the volumes.

When I was in college,

there was a a furniture maker there,

is really famous, named Jack Hopkins

and he taught me to make furniture by stacking wood.

And then I took his technique and transferred it to marble.

[soft piano music]

The columns all go down into the ground

approximately 14 feet.

The placement of the house was totally up to Ken.

It just goes to show you his genius though

that it's one thing to be looking at a topographical map,

but it blows your mind to try to think

about how you could place a building in a massive boulders.

It's almost beyond imagination how his mind works.

One of the main premise is that,

the interior and exterior become one as much as possible.

The house floor begins at the street

and flows through the whole house.

The material for it came from a rock slide.

It's an exact match in material and color

for the boulders that are in the house.

The boulders just flow

right through the floor out into the landscape.

I think this house will be around forever

because of the choice of materials.

It's basically stone that's been ground up

and put back together.

I'm a little bothered sometimes

by the label of organic architecture.

One influence that I never talked about

through my whole career was abstract expressionist painting

and you have like Jackson Pollock and you have Mark Rothko

and they're just completely different.

To me, I would just say, this is like Ken's thing.

Like, Ken's an artist.

I don't know if trying to put a label on it

really helps to describe what it is.

[gentle calm music]

The house, it has a certain austerity to it

but on the same token,

I think because of the choice of materials.

It feels really warm inside the house to me,

but it still has a little bit of edge to it,

which I really like.

When you have people in this space, it is great.

It is really wonderful.

Even though it was never made for entertaining,

it's the perfect spot to entertain.

My work on the house has taught me everything

about designing and fabricating, especially in recent years.

It's taught me to be more social,

enjoy showing it to people,

and so I feel really good about that.

This house comes as close as anything could be

to the feeling you get from like looking

at a Mark Rothko painting or listen to John Coltrane.

I hope he gets that feeling.

[calm gentle music]