Would I buy this house? No. I am not a fan of this style of home, at all. I don’t enjoy the Industrial style. If someone were giving the house to me, I’d definitely take it. But if I had $25,000,000, I wouldn’t spend it on this. It’s more than a little masculine for my taste. To my eye, this industrial look and feel is just boxes on top of boxes of glass and steel. It’s cold. Hard. A little slippery for my taste. This is what I have always thought of as a pu$y palace. A guy drives you up to the front door, and it’s just kind of understood that he expects you to give it up for the pleasure of sharing his illustrious company. It’s the kind of place men take you when they just know they can get you in the sack. And if you’re the kind of female looking for a sugar daddy, he would be right, wouldn’t he? This would work on a lot of women, but it feels like a steel cage to me. If I’m gonna live in a house like this, frankly, I don’t want to share it with a man and his shitty, masculine furniture. I’d want him gone so I could give this house the feminine touch it so desperately needs. 

So why did I give it five stars? Because in spite of everything I just said, this house is bad ass! Let’s skip past the fact that if you really look at this house, it’s nothing but a collection of boxes full of rectangles and boxes. And so are all the other houses around it. It’s boxes sitting on top of cubes, with rectangular windows. Even the lawn chairs are boxy. Round things are definitely in the minority in this house. I hate everything about how this house is furnished. I hate the color palette, I hate the carpets, and I loathe that shitty mid-century modern furniture. I get why they did the interiors this way. It’s “by the book”, but it’s a really guy thing to do to this house, which is already cold enough without adding even more BROWN to it. It’s brown enough outside without carrying more of it inside. This doesn’t feel like the kind of house you could really live in. That kitchen doesn’t feel at all like a cook’s kitchen, and it looks like probably never gets used, and why would you? You’d be too afraid of leaving fingerprints on all the shiny, slippery surfaces. A more creative use of steel would’ve been to ditch all that wood in the kitchen and go with black stainless steel on the islands and appliances. I would’ve gone black stainless on the outdoor kitchen too.

So again, why the five stars? Now you know my rule is to stay away from critiques about the decor because everybody’s tastes are different. But I can’t. There’s nothing actually wrong with this house. This isn’t my taste, but the finishes and furnishings are just wrong. You might love this look, and well you should. As I said, it’s by the book. You’re supposed to love it. But I love this house for different reasons. To me, this house is a missed opportunity. It has all the makings of the perfect desert home, even though it looks like a square and a cube hooked up and had a litter of boxes in the desert. The first thing that makes this house stand out is the fact that it uses all the colors and textures around it on the outside. They used Nature to guide their exterior color and texture choices, and it works. They just used a little too much of the brown while ignoring the green, and I get that. The concept was to create a flow between the indoors and outdoors. But this house doesn’t need that. It needs the exact opposite because it’s sitting in the middle of the desert, and it feels like it…there’s nothing but more freaking desert as far as the eye can see, indoors and out. There’s no getting away from it. It’s just everywhere!

What they ought to have done is make it feel like an oasis in the middle of the desert. That would’ve been cool! They could’ve used this house to create a lush, fertile respite from all that brown nothingness around it. This was a missed opportunity, because they could’ve brought a taste of the forest into the house. That’s the Nature this house is screaming for. The glass and steel is cool, but this house could’ve been a lovely glass jewel box of warm woods, fertile green flowering plants, and pops of bright, vivid color in the decor that would’ve warmed up that frigid interior. The house is just screaming for CONTRAST. A little jungle in the middle of all that desert. It’s got the desert-tolerant plants outside. Bringing the cacti and scrub inside was a mistake. I want to walk out of the desert outside, and into a home full of lush trees and plants. Warmth and brightness to offset all the brown. I need some blues and greens to bring some visual “water” to the desert. 

Most of all, I’d get rid of all that steel and rust, and replace it with a more productive use of natural surfaces. Instead of that shitty mid-century modern furniture, I would’ve way gone more Native American in my decor, or maybe Mayan, Incan, or Aztec. Or even better, I would’ve given it a Thai or Indonesian flavor. But I’d go native with that interior. More earthen vases and bowls, live-edge wooden benches, and soft, comfy seating with an indigenous, native feel to it. I could see going African with it, but I feel like that still would’ve made the place too masculine. It needs some Yin to go with its Yang. Creating an oasis indoors provides the kind of contrast that would’ve made that water feature and all those pools feel more like a lagoon and less like puddles in the mud. It would’ve made the house feel less icy and slippery. I want my guests to get a womb-like feeling from my home. That house makes me not want to touch anything. I want you to feel invited to touch everything. I want the decor of my house to feel like a home, not a magazine spread .I want you to feel warm and welcome, and so comfortable that you never want to leave. The fact that you don’t get that vibe from this house isn’t the fault of the home’s design. It’s the fault of its designer and their poor choice of interiors. The design of the house itself is very well done. So it gets five stars.