HIGH DESERT HOUSE

Adam Rouse has spent many seasons at the High Desert House in the Palm Springs area, overlooking the Coachella Valley. He’s photographed it at different times of year, and he designed it. After a career in architecture for more than 15 years, Adam shifted to photography full-time a few years ago. “I’m intimately familiar with the house,” he says. “I’ve been shooting it since the beginning, so I was very familiar with what the light was doing.”

The seasonal light inspired Adam to tell the home’s story differently, using shadows and the changing scenery around it to capture whole environment rather than simply photographing the interior and exterior. “My task as the photographer was to document how the landscape changed and how the building changed. It can become so abstract.”

Adam worked to capture the ephemeral nature of this change from day to day and season to season. “The interesting part of the desert is the starkness—the way the light hits the forms. It lends itself to a black and white approach for telling some of the story.” The question, he says, was how to juxtapose the building and the landscape, which inspires interiors even as far away as Bermonds Locke in London. Adam wanted to show how the landscape overwhelms the building at times and vice-versa.