In the beginning, when John Vugrin first began working on the project that would come to define his career, the Kellogg Doolittle House in Joshua Tree, California, the locals struggled to comprehend it. “It was more a curiosity” than a serious endeavor, as Vugrin recalls. Sited amid a mass of boulders abutting Joshua Tree National Park, the house seems teleported from some distant dimension—an armadillo perched on the hillside, perhaps, or an alien hideout.

It was Kendrick Bangs Kellogg, an admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright, who conceived of the otherworldly architecture in the late 1980s. But it was Vugrin, a designer, fabricator, furniture maker, and all-around master craftsman, who spent the ensuing two decades giving life to the swooping forms, handcrafting every last detail of the house, both inside and out: sculpted marble vanities, cantilevered steel tables, curved mahogany bookshelves, brutalist steel gates. It was a labor of intense and exacting devotion, of ensuring that each shower fixture and cabinet pull was just right. And then, in 2014, after the original owners, the artists Bev and Jay Doolittle, sold the property, Vugrin clashed with the buyers and was set adrift, his life’s work brought to a summary end. “I went through a period where I was like, man, I wasn’t really doing so hot,” he recalls.

But now, under the stewardship of new owner Scott Leonard, Vugrin has returned from exile to finish a project regarded today as the masterwork of a scandalously underappreciated architect. (Never has Kellogg’s dictum “If it is not a love affair with Mother Earth, it is not Architecture” seemed so resonant.) And Leonard, a Los Angeles marketing executive who purchased the house in 2021, has offered unprecedented access to architecture students and tour groups. And those who can pony up $6,500 a night get the chance to book a stay on Airbnb. The public turn has inspired newfound appreciation for Vugrin’s career. He, like Kellogg, was never one for self-promotion.

Vugrin, 68, channels a Zen-like calm, his hair a combed-back swoop of gray, his glasses horn-rimmed. You notice his hands, after a lifetime of work, as bulked up as a powerlifter’s. “In all the years I worked for him,” he says of Jay Doolittle, “I never even had a cup of coffee with him.” But he and Leonard, who gave a tour of the house together on a recent winter morning, have become friends, entering into a “massively codependent relationship,” as Leonard calls it: “I only have one person to go to. And he only really wants to work in one place.”

Vugrin found his calling in the 1970s, as a student at San Diego State University. The city had flourished as a postwar hotbed of handcrafted design, and he studied under two of the movement’s celebrated artists: Jack Hopkins and Larry Hunter, who were renowned for their sculptural wood furniture. Soon after graduation, Vugrin displayed three of his fledgling pieces in a crafts exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art. It was a moment of architectural kismet, because Kellogg took a shine to one of the designs—a wood rocking chair with swooping, futuristic lines—giving rise to their partnership.

For the Guth Residence in San Diego, one of around a dozen projects they worked on together, Vugrin built the kitchen, which was curved like a snail shell, to enable the owners’ son, who had quadriplegia, to navigate the space. He learned to weld, began experimenting with marble, and mastered electrical and plumbing work when he helped restore a handful of other houses in San Diego. By the time he arrived in Joshua Tree in 1994, his skill set as vast as Kellogg’s ambition, construction had started on the 26 soaring concrete columns, dug at least 14 feet into the bedrock, that overlap to form the roofline of the house. (Doolittle is, technically, wall-less, the existing boulders at the site incorporated into the design.) Vugrin’s first task: enclosing the spaces between columns with windows and doors to create the main envelope. “Jay said, ‘Let’s try this door, and if we like it, we’ll see where it goes,’” Vugrin recalls. “And I made the first door, and they really dug it. And it was just full-on from there.”

For the first six years, he commuted from San Diego, living four days a week in an apartment in the home’s underground garage. Designs started as sketches in notepads and became life-size drawings; on-site iteration was common. For the bronze fireplace hood, which resembles a jagged prehistoric tooth, Vugrin and Kellogg created mock-ups using wire and cardboard and tweaked them until they arrived at the desired shape. Drama unfolds around every corner: two glass-topped cantilevered art tables, their steel spinal columns spiraling theatrically through the air; a floating sink sculpted out of layers of marble, a technique Vugrin borrowed from Hopkins’s woodworking; a double-sided freestanding vanity, the bottom a series of ribbed cabinets, the top a double sink basin and mirror sculpted out of bronze. Even Vugrin concedes that the vanity, which harbors a whiff of sci-fi, might be a bit much, but there’s delight in the meticulous extravagance.

A first-time visitor might expect a spiky coldness to predominate, but the house exudes unexpected warmth, with the architecture and interiors all of a piece, their seamless combination casting an enchanting spell. Kellogg, who died in February at age 89, had honored Vugrin’s contributions to Doolittle and his other projects with a simple yet profound gesture. That rocking chair of Vugrin’s that he first saw at the exhibition? He purchased it but never let anyone use it; instead, he hung it from the ceiling of his living room in an act of loving preservation.

Adrift after losing his workspace at Doolittle in 2014, when the second owners cut him loose, Vugrin established his own studio—a tractor garage he ordered from somewhere in the Midwest and installed next to his house in the hills of Yucca Valley (no building permits necessary). Inside the tentlike dome, one finds saws of every configuration: table saws, a band saw, a chop saw, as well as a drill press, a welder, and all sorts of grinders for working on marble. “Not a fancy setup,” he says, but with views overlooking the valley below and the light filtering through the dome’s translucent shell, there’s an understated purity to it.

Sporting a pair of blue Dickies coveralls, Vugrin shows off the in-progress frame of a sofa he’s designing for Doolittle (now complete), which features built-in side tables and a floating back cantilevered from an interior boulder—a cool visual effect. Ultimately, he acknowledges, the eight-year break from the house served him well. Spending so much time there is “kind of like looking at your own face after a while—you don’t really have proper perspective. That’s why it was good to get away.”

During his hiatus, Vugrin spearheaded the restoration of the Cree House in Cathedral City, designed in 1955 by the Swiss-born architect Albert Frey. Plumbing, electrical, gas lines, decking, exterior fiberglass panels and cement board, interior wood paneling, plastic shelving from the original GE refrigerator—Vugrin left no detail unattended. “The knowledge that guy has,” says Sam Harris, who hired Vugrin to revive the house before selling it. “The more you get to know him, the deeper it goes. I mean, the guy is incredible.”

“I don’t want to be like Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island, where you had only one show your entire life.”
—John Vugrin, designer

By all accounts, Vugrin logs long hours, with little patience for anyone lacking his commitment. In the late 1980s, he spent seven or eight months in Karuizawa, Japan, overseeing the stoneworkers constructing Kellogg’s Hoshino chapel, a celebrated wedding destination. (Vugrin designed the wood pews and bronze doors.) “I didn’t have a very good experience there,” he says, describing how workers fibbed about having waterproofed the chapel’s foundation, an oversight revealed by spring storms. “The owner and general contractor were buddies, so they would always go behind your back.”

He’s not without personal extravagances. Consider his collection of suits, about 70 in total, many of them vintage, which he pairs with 300 sets of cuff links and 250 ties—a collection that began after he met his wife, a former Vogue model in Mexico City. (She likes him looking his best.) And he’s not resistant to change. For the brass outdoor lights that now line the new pathway to the main entrance, he decided to give the computer a try, sending the specs to some architects in Santa Barbara, who loaded them into CAD and then used a CNC machine to cut the outlines. But the shapes never came out right, and so Vugrin fabricated the fixtures on his own, using bronze powder and a silicone mold. Everything at the house (a few plumbing and AC parts excluded) remains of his hand.

Standing there in Vugrin’s workshop, you’re struck by a sudden sense of impending loss. When will we see such unhurried devotion to craft again pursued on such an outrageously ambitious scale? (Vugrin spent six years alone drying the mahogany for the built-in bookshelves in the primary bedroom, in an attempt to prevent shrinkage.) He’s not sure what’s next; he’ll be in his early 70s when he’s finally finished with Doolittle. “I’ll find something to do. I’m not worried about it. I mean, I can always hang drywall.”

—

Head back to the July/August 2024 issue homepage

Also Appears In

The Under-the-Radar Craftsman Behind a Very Iconic Masterpiece