Following the publicity whirlwind that engulfed Joshua Tree we started receiving enquiries about whether the house could be reproduced en masse.
Enquiries for holiday resorts in Jordan, or a series of Airbnb retreats across the United States, or sometimes just wanting to buy a unique prefabricated holiday house for Aspen or the Hamptons.
I think a lot of these enquiries came about because the Joshua Tree Residence is created out of shipping containers, so people maybe perceived it as easily transportable. The joy of that project though is taking something that is highly generic and transportable and turning that into something very unique and site-specific.
Basically, if I was going to design a mass produce-able house the Joshua Tree Residence wouldn’t be it. But that raises the question, what would be my answer to a prefabricated, modular house?
The starting point was that I wanted there to be the potential that no two homes look the same – every client’s home to be unique. And I wanted to create a design that, using standard elements, could create a 5-bed hilltop house or a 1-bed lake edge villa, associated with a hotel.
So far we’ve designed 3 different bedroom units, a living room unit, a kitchen unit, an entrance hall unit, a bathroom unit and a study unit, and with time this will be expanded upon. Each unit has two or more openings that can be the point of connection to the next unit or can be capped with a window or door.
So every time you add another unit there are at least 2 orientations for that unit, and with no limit on how many units you can daisy-chain together, there is an infinite number of possibilities.
The germ of an idea for the Anywhere House came from an amalgamation of years spent working on hotel projects, where there is normally the simple recipe of corridor – bathroom – bedroom – window.
A piece of climbing equipment called a hex which has an irregular shape that can be orientated in a variety of different ways allowing it to fit snuggly into different sized cracks. The Anywhere House can be arranged in countless orientations and combinations to fit your needs and site.
We are currently working towards building the first Anywhere House on the side of a lake in Montana, USA. While the shape of each unit is set, the external and internal finishes can be changed for each client and location. Source and images Courtesy of Whitaker Studio.
