The Narrative of the Dialogue House in Phoenix spans a decade and a half. Architect Wendell Burnette designed the house from the late 1990s, earning a prestigious Progressive Architecture Award in 1999. It was built for one customer but fell into disrepair. The new owners, the Hylands, bought the house in 2010 if they were newly engaged and hired Burnette to help fix it up and complete the vision he had begun years before. The result is a minimalist masterpiece which stands out from its desert setting.
at a Glance
Who lives here: Thomas and Laura Hyland
Location: Phoenix
Size: 2,545 square feet; 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms
That’s intriguing: The house’s name refers to the dialogue between the house and the pool; the former is extroverted and the latter is introverted.
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The house sits on a corner lot at the base of Echo Mountain, one of some fairly unremarkable homes from the 1950s and ’60s. It has two stories and sits on the high side of their property; there are steps down to the pool, where we’re looking here. The top-floor living area sits behind a massive picture window that looks to the south and remote views of downtown Phoenix and the Sierra Estrella mountain range.
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Here is a view from the living area along with its terrace. The shine of Phoenix is undeniable, but the pool is its own allure. From this view we get an notion of this dialogue that the pool and house have: the prior looks out to the expanse of the hills and desert urbanity, while the walls of this latter block the same and put the focus, as we’ll see, on the sky.
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While this house is on the south side of this mountain, Burnette’s own house (completed in 1995) is nearby, on the north side of this mountain. Burnette articulated his own split-level house as two parallel concrete-block walls with glazed finishes and an entry court in the center of this plan. A similar tactic obviously occurs from the Dialogue House’s oversize picture window. A little courtyard also is supplied on the west side of the house, behind the wall on the left.
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When the Hylands purchased the house, the stucco exterior was so far gone that it had to be wholly replaced. Before that the stucco was finished a deep red, sitting over the darkened walls of the ground floor. (See many photos of the house in the past days here.) But in the house’s transformation, Burnette created the stucco darker and more diverse, not as even across its surface. The effect is mottled, such as the desert earth of this landscape. It also sets up a distinction between the dark exterior and light inside, a noticeable trend.
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Among the most intriguing elements of Burnette’s layout is the way he used site walls to define outdoor spaces and create a feeling of enclosure on the expansive hillside. Walls radiate from the two-story rectangular plan: east into the driveway, south into the pool and west into the courtyard. Here we are situated along the wall on the east, awaiting an exterior stair which ascends into the courtyard on the opposite side of the house.
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However, the greatest definition happens in the pool, in which 13-foot-high whitewashed walls frame the sky. Small squares are cut to the walls just above standard, so on the pool side they are positioned a couple feet over the water. These openings add a secondary light source to the outside room, a speckled band that glows at certain times of the day and glows from the inside out during the night.
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Storage was pushed into the good side walls to maintain the inside open. In this view we’re looking from the kitchen into the living area and access to the courtyard on the west side of the house. The loft-like master bedroom is located past the wall on the right, and also on the left side is that the large picture window.
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In this last opinion we’re looking 180 degrees from the previous view, toward the one-wall kitchen which follows the concept of perimeter storage. The lower wall on the left side is the master bedroom, with all the tall walls housing the master bathroom (the other two bathrooms and bedrooms are downstairs). In this view we see how well the storage and open-plan concept work, but also how the terrace can help to shade the inside and its generous glass wall capturing magnificent desert views.
Builder: The Construction Zone
Photographs: Bill Timmerman