The Meredith Residence

The Phoenix-based architect Wendell Burnette is known for designing buildings with a keen sense of place, whether it’s a galvanized zinc box of a house that sits on a flat Wisconsin crop field or the house shown here, on a five-acre site in a desert valley north of Cave Creek, Arizona. Designed as an emptynest home for Keith and Kim Meredith, the distinctive structure defines, Burnette says, “the core concept of how we live in the desert.” His clients, whom he describes as “into Eastern philosophy, paring down, and being close to nature,” had no interest in a conventional house.