Hoot Owl Ranch - Joshua Tree Boulder View Cabin

The home is a quick drive from the Joshua Tree National Park entrance and makes a great base for exploring and enjoying its well-known recreational opportunities—hiking, bouldering, and rock climbing. After nightfall, the home offers amazing peace and quiet and breathtaking starry skies that are joined by twinkling city lights below to brighten the night. Palm Springs, with its vibrant Desert Modernist design community, is further away, yet still easily accessible from the home.

There’s ample free parking and the unpaved landscaped driveway is designed to allow a semi truck to turn around, so campers and trailers are welcome. There are remote mountains, trails and dirt roads to explore right out of the door and yet we are only 300 yards from paved roads and two miles from the heart of town.

The home’s bedrooms are ideal for hosting, with the vaulted plywood main suite offering floor-to-ceiling windows with big views, a built-in king bed, and a deep bathtub isolated in a picture window alcove with views onto the rocks outside. An additional en-suite bathroom offers both indoor and outdoor showers, the latter with access to the home’s covered, porch-like deck that frames the building and offers outdoor lounge and dining areas. A second bedroom offers a queen-sized bed and workspace, plus another en-suite bath. And the kids will love the bunk room, with its four beds, own TV and big windows onto the desert world scurrying by outside.

The homesteader’s place had been added onto over the years, and the space felt haphazard at best, so the owner returned it to its original footprint, salvaged the wood and concrete from it for reuse, and set about tackling his redesign. The idea was to blur the boundaries between indoors and out, so he raised the roof, created an open floor plan, added modern bathrooms and a large bedroom suite, and upcycled the homestead’s original wood and concrete into exterior and interior cladding, outdoor furniture, and patios and walkways.

Indoors, white oak covers the communal-styled kitchen that is fully equipped to serve a crowd with a dining area that seats 12 and a window seat-type reading nook that seats an additional five. The decor throughout favors a mid-century vibe, and furnishings include Hay pieces made to replicate Danish Modern designs. Open, floor-to-ceiling shelves divide the cathedral-ceilinged living room from the dining area, and the mid-century modern look continues, where the fireplace mantle holds cool wooden accessories, funky pendant lamps hang overhead, and a 1970s era swing chair sways in one of the many banks of windows offering views out onto the rugged, prehistoric-seeming landscape.