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Robert Stone isn’t here to play the nostalgia game.
He grew up in Palm Springs, yes, but not in the Rat Pack fantasy version that shows up on souvenir coasters. His dad built houses throughout the Coachella Valley: clean-lined, sun-bleached, quintessential desert. The family lived in a revolving door of them, often packing up and moving on as soon as the next one was ready.
“I basically do the architecture version of what he did,” Stone says now with a shrug.
Stone has the look of someone who’s spent years in the desert, and even longer thinking about why things are the way they are. Clean-shaven, lean, tall, he carries himself with a kind of alert intensity, like he’s listening to something other people can’t quite hear. There’s no performance in the way he talks, just a deep, practiced habit of paying attention. It’s easy to imagine him building a house the same way he builds a thought: piece by piece, until it holds.
His fluency in the visual vocabulary of the desert — the breeze blocks, the long shadows, the just-so landscaping — means he can stretch it, twist it, question it, and ultimately interpret it into something thornier. Something truer. Beyond that, Stone’s work is far more slippery to define: intimate but not sentimental, architectural but also theatrical, deeply Californian but never obedient to the party line.
His latest project, a recently completed estate in Rancho Mirage, offers the clearest expression yet of that evolving vision. Set on a sweeping 3.83-acre lot that used to be a date field, the house is surrounded by panoramic mountain views and anchored by Stone’s ambition to define a new desert architecture. Blending elements of classic modernism with Spanish influences, the home isn’t easily labeled, and that’s the point. It’s a residence that asks to be experienced rather than explained, grounded in its environment while challenging the conventions of what desert living is supposed to look like.
“In general, I look at things and try to see them for what they are and disconnect them from past ideas to understand what they mean now,” he says.
In the context of Palm Springs design, that’s borderline heresy. But Stone doesn’t mind being the guy who mutters something unsettling at the cocktail party.
“People here love architecture. I should say they love dead architects,” he says with a dry laugh. “There’s this excitement around modernism that is great, but most think modern equals new — it’s 80 years old. I mean, it’s really old.”
This ambivalence is what gives Stone’s buildings their edge. His earlier homes in Joshua Tree — Acido Dorado, all gold and mirrors and theatrical stillness, and Rosa Muerta, black as an oil slick and just as provocative — weren’t designed to stay in their lanes. They were meant to unsettle, shimmer, seduce. And that’s exactly what they’ve done.
Acido Dorado was featured in Vogue Italia, shot by Steven Klein for Roberto Cavalli in a lavish, high-gloss campaign that matched the house’s surreal energy. Rosa Muerta, meanwhile, has appeared in Elle Décor, Dwell, and even Playboy, and has served as a location for underground fashion labels and avant-garde video shoots. Over the years, both houses have developed cult status — worshipped by architecture nerds, rented by stylists, and sometimes mistaken for conceptual art installations. Which, honestly, they are.
Then there’s the “punk rock architect” moniker, a label Stone doesn’t exactly reject, though he’s quick to clarify the spirit behind it.
“A lot of my worldview comes from being a nerdy punk. I would read Maximum Rocknroll magazine from cover to cover, and I believed in punk as an intellectual exercise,” he says.
For him, punk isn’t about destruction. It’s about initiative. Imagination. The willingness to create something better, not just stand around sneering at the status quo: “So I talk the punk guy, but the intention is to inspire.”
It’s fair to say Stone isn’t designing rebellion for rebellion’s sake. He’s trying to crack things open, let in a little air. This perspective informs his own work as an architect and designer, which both engages with and subverts the legacy of modernism.
“Post-modernism in architecture was misconstrued with irony. I’m interested in post-modernism without the irony,” he adds. “Sincerity is the only thing that changes people’s minds or inspires them.”
It’s a clarifying ethos: DIY but make it architecture. His buildings don’t just buck trends, they interrogate them. Why do we live the way we do? Who decided that glass boxes were aspirational? Why does the desert feel like an Instagram loop of itself? How can we design the future?
What Informs His Work-
Stone came of age as an architect in the 1990s, just as modernism was entering its glossy commercial renaissance. “In the ’90s, all of a sudden, the design culture kind of came up around Apple computers and that whole consumer tech aesthetic. People wanted modern houses that looked like that, and architects who were my professors were like, ‘Wow, we can actually make money doing this!’ — which meant that we were going to be doing this for a few decades.”
For Stone, the alignment between advertising, product design, and architecture was a warning sign. “I was sure that when we opened architecture magazines and all the product ads were the same as the featured houses in it, it was all locked in, and no new ideas were allowed.”
It was a realization that both repelled and galvanized him. Rather than chase the slick, commodified version of modernism that was becoming the norm, Stone turned toward something more personal. He wanted to make work that felt less like branding and more like art. Something that resisted consumption and invited contemplation.
“I was trying to find a way to make something that felt more like poetry,” he says. “I ended up gravitating toward the aesthetic language that I understood the best.”
That language, inevitably, was the desert. “I felt like I had a familiarity with this place and the aesthetics,” he continues.
Joshua Tree, where his earlier projects landed, gave him the space to explore that mystery. The rawness of the landscape amplified his designs, making them feel like ruins from the future or sets from some forgotten dream.
“It benefits from the raw landscape around it,” he says. “So I can do something up there with this kind of weird memory of modernism, and it’s made more powerful by the raw desert around the house. Whereas down here, the context is different.”
His homes don’t behave the way desert homes are supposed to. They confront the terrain. Engage it. Poke at it. They shimmer, shift, unsettle — sometimes beautiful, sometimes strange, always provocative. They don’t ask to be liked. They ask to be felt.
“I do think I’ve found a way to make things here that feel like poetry,” Stone says again, doubling down on the sentiment. “Things that remind me of what I grew up around but also push against it. This is where I can make my best work.”
Underpinning it all is a clear critique of design culture’s current safe mode, all beige restraint and Instagram consensus. Stone sees that safety as cynicism. And for someone often labeled a provocateur, his motivation is surprisingly earnest.
“You don’t do this work if you’re not optimistic. The people who helped me put together this project, they are optimistic people, because they realized we can do something new here,” he says. “I think making the same sort of beige and gray ‘tasteful modernism’ that everybody knows how to value, that’s actually cynical.”
The Rancho Mirage Vision-
Growing up in Palm Springs gave Robert Stone a studied vantage point. He remembers the light, the heat, the geometry of the place, but also the strange choreography of fantasy and reality. “Palm Springs was always presented as this glamorous escape, but the reality was more complex. There was a whole infrastructure that supported that fantasy, and not everyone got to participate in the dream. That’s something I think about a lot in my work — who gets to define what’s beautiful, and why?” That tension between the image and the infrastructure, the spectacle and the scaffolding runs through everything Stone builds. It’s what led him to develop a style that’s both cerebral and tactile, rooted in the desert but never beholden to it. “Perfection is boring,” he says. “The things that stay with you, that feel alive, are always the ones that have some kind of tension.” His Rancho Mirage project — a pair of structures called Dreamer and Lil’ Dreamer, their names a nod to West Coast street culture — exemplifies that philosophy and then some.
The brutalist concrete walls feel immovable, almost ancient, but they’re softened by flashes of metallic surfaces that shift with the sun. These are buildings that play with scale and drama: diagonal rooftop planes, voids and shadows, punctuated by unexpected moments of intimacy. It’s not modernism, and it’s not a total rejection of it either. It’s a conversation — between then and now, between fantasy and materiality.
“I wanted to create something that wasn’t easy to digest,” Stone says. “A place that makes you stop and think.”
Unlike the pristine white boxes that populate many desert developments, his house revels in texture and materiality. The composed breeze blocks are sculptural and expressive, each intentionally placed. Even the landscaping resists easy categorization. Stone embraced artificial turf, extending the aesthetic into the interior with a green carpet.
Nowhere is his ethos more visible than in the silver Spanish roofing tiles, a nod to traditional clay tile roofs but rendered in a way that feels almost alchemical.
“This metallic tile roof thing, I’ve been using that idea in my sketchbooks and my studio work for 30 years,” he explains. “The material is basically pottery, so I did some experiments using metallic glaze on it, and it transformed. It has a handmade texture, but the metallic finish and futuristic silver color bring opposites together. That and a totally new way to make a roof shape interact with the building — it’s like a Spanish space ship.”
Another element adds a layer of wit and critique to the structures. Perched on the rooflines are what appear to be air conditioning units, except they’re not functional. They’re sculptures — perfect metallic cubes with softened edges and smoothed louvers, finished in gleaming gold. Stone designed them as a kind of architectural jewelry — minimal yet flashy, familiar yet strange.
“The idea is to make something we all ignore into a decorative part of the house,” he says.
It’s more than a visual gag. The gold AC cube is part commentary, part homage. “There’s a whole history of the cube in minimalist sculpture from Larry Bell onward,” Stone says.
It’s also a meditation on how we experience the desert: how we pretend to live in communion with nature while hiding behind the hum of climate control. It’s a sly wink, one that calls into question the entire fantasy of desert living.
“The air conditioner is the thing that makes houses livable down here, and yet we ignore them,” he says. “We pretend we’re living in nature, but it’s air-conditioned nature. I think that’s more interesting.”
Stone spent years inhabiting the ideas for this Rancho Mirage project, his first on home turf. It wasn’t just another commission; it was a personal reckoning with the landscape that shaped him. He wanted to get it right. Every material, every slope, every glint of gold was a deliberate choice, because the point wasn’t to build something beautiful, it was to make something true.
Stone’s designs are places to live, sure, but they’re also places to wake up — to how we shape the spaces around us, to how those spaces, in turn, reflect what we value, what we believe, what we feel. If the desert has taught Stone anything, it’s that architecture doesn’t need to be nostalgic or new, minimal or maximal, it simply needs to say something.