Los Angeles–based fashion insider Francesca Laranga dreamed of creating a different kind of desert getaway. “I wanted this house to be a kind of sacred space,” she explains. It’s why she calls the ensuing project, located in the town of Joshua Tree, California, the Tera Haus—tera translates to temple in Japanese.

“It’s a temple for me and my guests: a place to access the silence of the desert,” Francesca says. “That’s why it feels so restorative to be there. It feels sacred because you’re disconnected from everything that’s overwhelming these days, but you’re also connected to the earth. Somehow, it makes you connect with yourself in a different way—it’s really special.”

Not unlike a real religious pilgrimage, Francesca faced an arduous journey as she set out to complete the home in 2020, amidst pandemic lockdowns and supply chain volatility.

Francesca is from Bologna, Italy, and while working in the fashion industry she lived in Berlin and made regular trips to Paris. “I’ve always traveled so much— maybe too much—my entire life,” she says. “Then, when I arrived in California, it felt like I could put down some roots here.”

She had only visited the site, in a small valley near the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, on one occasion before purchasing the land—but that was enough to convince her. “There was this steep road, and then you go down into this sort of private cove and it’s stunning. You feel a very, very different energy,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘This is it. This is it.’”

The property sale closed just about a week before the first U.S. quarantines started. “I got a little scared, and I was like, ‘What am I doing now?’” Francesca says. “But then I thought, ‘You know what? Just do it.’”

Francesca initially considered building a prefab house as a practical measure—a way to bring high-end design to a relatively remote location. She talked to over 20 different firms, many of which specialize in prefabricated homes, but most were from outside the United States, which made logistics challenging, especially given the timing.

Then she found the Montevideo, Uruguay–based firm Mapa Architects after reading about one of their modular houses in Dwell, built using precast concrete. “This solution allows us to build really quick with a reasonable ratio of money, time, and results,” says Mapa cofounding partner Mauricio López Franco.

Even though they communicated remotely and have never met in person, Francesca says she enjoyed “a beautiful exchange” with López Franco and his cofounding partner, Andrés Gobba Hannay. Yet the building approaches Mapa had utilized in South America proved unfeasible, or at least cost-prohibitive, in the States—particularly the precast concrete. Uruguay’s precast providers are small enough to take orders at the scale of a single-family house. In the U.S., they work at the scale of parking garages and big-box retail stores.

“We needed to recalculate quickly and remake the project,” says López Franco.

Though its construction method evolved, the hallmarks of Francesca’s design brief and Mapa’s concept are clearly recognizable: shade and shadows. Francesca drew inspiration from Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 book In Praise of Shadows, which emphasizes the interplay of light and shadow in Japanese aesthetics and architecture.

While the home’s design is partly about its axial connections and openings, with doors and windows on multiple sides, it’s also about minimizing direct sun exposure.

“This was our starting point: shadows and shading from the sun,” López Franco explains. “In our presentation to Francesca, one direct reference was the moment at the beach when you put your umbrella down in a spot.” The presentation also cited a 1981 painting by New York artist Eric Fischl called Bad Boy, in which patterned light and shadows from an emblazoned window blind fall upon a woman laying atop an unmade bed.

“It was really a strong statement that shadow is important,” López Franco says. “And when we see the project today, we still see the idea that we had: a unifying roof with these indentions into the interior, where the sun enters differently at different times of year.”

The rectangular house is just under 1,000 square feet, with two bedrooms, a laundry area, and a study to the west and a combined kitchen and living area to the east. Along the home’s southern edge is an open hallway—a continuation of the original prefab layout that allows for another house with the same plan to form an expansion.

At the eastern edge of the house is a carport that can double as a covered outdoor gathering space; because it’s within the same flat-roofed span, this space reads not as an add-on to the house but as one continuous composition. On the northern side of the house is a deck and outdoor pool, complemented by a pair of custom sun lounges.

The home’s white stucco exterior echoes the historic missions dotting the California coast, yet the white cladding, horizontal form, and outdoor pool give it a hint of classic Southern California midcentury modernism (examples of which can be found in nearby Palm Springs). Portions of the outer facade are also clad in ribbed wood, softening its appearance while introducing texture and additional shadows.

The interior is deliberately minimal, with concrete floors, maple-clad kitchen cabinetry, and an island topped with an extra-thick slab of black Caesarstone cut to Francesca’s specifications. A long Sonneman Thin-Line LED pendant light hangs above the island and adjacent dining table.

“It's all about the little details,” Francesca says. There are relatively few furnishings in the house, although she decided to splurge on a chair from Batten and Kamp gallery in Hong Kong that could double as sculpture, with folded steel atop a large rock.

Francesca took an active role in the design and construction process—from helping to craft a post-prefab plan B to coordinating much of the building and material procurement—and she has even changed careers as a result. Her new company, Interlude Studio, manages the property development process from beginning to end.

“She has extremely good taste, since she comes from the fashion world,” López Franco says. “But at the same time, she has the energy that producers have, remembering that we need to get things done. I also think she understands that when you are creating something, you need room to make decisions and bring ideas. So, we worked with extreme freedom, yet in a very close manner together—a very good relationship.”

Francesca also oversaw the landscape design for the five-acre property, adding native desert plants that synch with the existing flora. “It looks like the house was supposed to be there,” she says. “It’s like the surroundings are accepting the building.”

For all the restrained beauty of the house itself, the architecture yields to the landscape, providing not just shelter from the desert but a direct connection to nature. That’s what the notion of Tera Haus as a spiritual sanctuary is all about.

“The smell in the desert, especially after it rains, is magical,” Francesca says. “And the colors change every month. In March, everything was green—and I was like, ‘This is the desert; how can I have the all this green around me?’ Every time I go, it’s different.”

More projects by Mapa Architects:

A Home in Brazil Blends Colonial Architecture With Miesian Modernism

One of Argentina’s First Passive Houses Stands Tall Above Rising Tides

A Connecticut Couple Build an Off-Grid Dream Home in the Prairies of Uruguay

A Remote Prefab in Uruguay Is Completely Self-Sufficient

Project Credits:

Lead Designer: Mapa Architects / @mapaarq

Project Lead and Interior Design: Interlude Studio

Architect of Record: Malek Alqadi

Structural Engineer: Labib Funk + Associates

Appears In

Near Joshua Tree, a Sublime Desert Home Embraces Shadows and Sunlight