A Modern California Home Built to Beat the Desert Heat
The weekend house, which cost $5.2 million with the land, is used for entertaining, with six sitting areas, and matching indoor and outdoor kitchens that cost a total of $400,000
The weekend house, which cost $5.2 million with the land, is used for entertaining, with six sitting areas, and matching indoor and outdoor kitchens that cost a total of $400,000
Autumn has arrived in Palm Desert, Calif., and residents are rejoicing, as the season brings more-amenable temperatures after the scorching summer. For local homeowner Daniel Simon, 54, leaving behind the heat means he can resume making the most of his modern, 5,000-square-foot house, where his weekends are often spent entertaining.
Mr. Simon, an elevator contractor and native of Southern California, divides his time between Orange County, where his primary residence has views of Newport Bay; a horse ranch in the mountains above Coachella Valley; and Palm Desert, where the home’s four bedrooms, five bathrooms and six distinct sitting areas welcome his guests on a grand but comfortable scale.
In early 2018, he paid $1.3 million for an empty 1/3-acre lot at Bighorn Golf Club, where he has clubhouse privileges that he says required an initiation fee of $100,000. He went on to spend $3.875 million to build, furnish and landscape the single-story house. The home’s key decorative touches include a fountain-enhanced courtyard pond just inside the main entrance and the great room’s $7,500 hand-carved basalt table, which sets the tone for the airy living space.
In the infernal summers, the 14-foot-high great room shuts out the heat and keeps in the cool, while glazing on all sides lets in the views of the mountains and the desert that drew Mr. Simon to the area in the first place. He spent $155,000 on his heating, cooling and ventilation system, which includes seven air-conditioning units. Underfloor heating for the bathrooms comes in handy in the winter, when nighttime temperatures can drop into the 40s.
In mild weather, Mr. Simon uses an iPad to open up the interiors with retracting doors. The great room and the patio become a single indoor-outdoor space, where he can sip his morning coffee made in his indoor kitchen’s built-in Miele machine.
Morning habits are key, says Mr. Simon, who describes himself as “an early guy.” His choice of an east-facing lot means he can enjoy desert sunrises and be spared the harsh afternoon sun. “A lot of people want to face south or southeast,” he adds, but he says that choice is desirable only a few months of the year.
Mr. Simon worked with Marc Whipple of Whipple Russell Architects, a Southern California studio, to design the home. The house features two gas fireplaces—one in the living room and another in the main bedroom, costing a total of $30,000—and a large fire pit on the patio. A $125,000 saltwater infinity pool in the back corresponds to the pond and fountains near the front, which cost $50,000.
Yoav Weiss, Whipple Russell’s project architect on the Simon property, says his client wanted to encounter natural elements from every vantage point. Fireplaces, mountains, or water features can be seen from the remotest corners of the home and patio.
It was a structural challenge to keep the views completely horizontal. The goal was to make the property as level as possible, says Mr. Weiss, by blending the great room with the outdoor space. The same porcelain-tile flooring was used inside and out, but to allow for drainage outside—essential in a climate where rare but strong downpours are an annual occurrence—the patio area was dug out and then built up again.
Inside, the porcelain tiles have grouting, but outside, lack of grouting between the same tiles allows for runoffs “without any thresholds, steps, or undulating sloping surfaces,” he says. Mr. Simon spent $75,000 on the indoor porcelain flooring and $50,000 on the outdoor version.
The indoor and outdoor kitchens also mirror each other with similar stone backsplashes and white islands. They cost a total of $400,000. Mr. Simon turned both into so-called entertainment kitchens, equipped with bar areas that can become audience seating for when a hired chef prepares a meal.
Back inside, Mr. Simon has richly patterned wallpaper, hardwood floors and area rugs to create textural contrasts in the bedrooms. For his $85,000 media room, which can be wide-open for TV viewing or isolated for a movie, he contrasts the high-tech sleekness of the screen with a backing of rough-hewed cowhide.
A glass-walled, climate-controlled wine room, with display space for nearly 200 bottles plus a stone table for tastings, is a cooling visual contrast to the desert views outside.
Mr. Simon had a previous Coachella Valley home in nearby Rancho Mirage. A big change in his new property is the landscaping—away from what he calls a lush country-club vibe with grass, flowers and palm trees. Now, more conscious of water usage and deferring to the requirements of the golf course’s development company, he has desert plantings, including cactuses, agaves and yuccas. Forgoing grass entirely, he opted for a small area of artificial turf between the main bedroom and the outdoor Jacuzzi.
Anne Attinger, the local landscape architect who worked with Mr. Simon, says the lot takes advantage of mature tree canopies that technically belong to the golf course but merge seamlessly into Mr. Simon’s yard, filling up the view with yellow flowers in the spring. “He got lucky,” she says.
Early indications from several big regional real-estate boards suggest March was overall another down month.
Art can transform more than just walls—it shapes mood, evokes memory, and elevates the everyday. Discover how thoughtfully curated interiors can become living expressions of personal meaning and refined luxury, from sculptural furniture to bespoke murals.
Early indications from several big regional real-estate boards suggest March was overall another down month.
OTTAWA–The nascent recovery in Canada’s housing market has become a casualty of the trade dispute with the U.S.
The latest national home-resale data are due out Tuesday, but early indications from several big regional real-estate boards suggest March was overall another down month as many prospective buyers exercised caution.
The recent weakness in home sales has dimmed the previously brighter outlook for the property market coming into 2025, when buyers were encouraged by the Bank of Canada’s aggressive interest-rate cuts.
“The chills the U.S. trade war has sent through participants in the housing market are getting frostier,” said Robert Hogue , assistant chief economist at Royal Bank of Canada.
Hogue said resales are down materially in a number of markets two months running, and home prices in several markets are coming under pressure as inventories rise. And although Canada was spared additional levies when President Trump unveiled so-called reciprocal tariffs on dozens of countries earlier this month, no meaningful rebound is likely so long as trade uncertainty lingers, he said.
Home buyers in Toronto, Canada’s most populous city and the country’s financial hub, aren’t turning up for the usual spring pickup in property-market activity.
Sales in the Greater Toronto Area slumped 23.1% in March from a year earlier, as new listings for the region jumped close to 29%, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board. That marked the worst month of resales since 1998.
The board’s chief information officer, Jason Mercer , said many potential home buyers were likely taking a wait-and-see approach given the economic worries as well as a pending federal election. “Homebuyers need to feel their employment situation is solid before committing to monthly mortgage payments over the long term,” he said, adding that ownership has become more affordable and prices in the area fell about 3.8% year on year in March.
Uncertainty is also weighing on the housing market in Calgary, the biggest city in oil-rich Alberta. The city’s real-estate board said realtors reported a 19% drop in sales of existing homes from last year, with a similar trend of improving supply and a sharp increase in the average number of days that homes were on the market.
On the West Coast, home sales registered in the metro Vancouver area of British Columbia were the lowest for March since 2019, falling 13.4% on a year earlier and coming in close to 37% below the 10-year seasonal average, while active listings continued to rise.
There are some areas of resilience. The Quebec Professional Association of Real Estate Brokers said total sales in the province were up 9% year on year in March. Still, RBC’s Hogue estimated Montreal sales in March were down about 15% from December seasonally adjusted, effectively rolling back the advance since the end of last summer.
The most recent national data for the country, from the Canadian Real Estate Association, showed resales dropped 9.8% month over month in February, when homebuyers may also have been put off by harsh winter storms in parts of the country. That marked the sharpest fall since May 2022 and brought the level of sales to their lowest level since November 2023, snapping signs that activity had been picking up in recent months.
Rishi Sondhi , an economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank, in a recent report estimated the country was tracking toward a double-digit quarterly decline in Canadian home sales and a mid-single-digit drop in Canadian average home prices for the first three months of 2025. That is much weaker than a pre-Trump inauguration forecast made in December that projected a loosening in federal mortgage rules, lower interest rates and continued economic growth would fuel a modest gain in sales and prices.
Central-bank officials are set to decide Wednesday on monetary policy, but they have signaled a cautious approach to rates as they balance the prospect of tariffs stoking price pressures against the likelihood that they will dampen demand and weigh on the economy. That could mean the Bank of Canada will pause after seven straight cuts to its policy rate.
Housing is a hot topic for party leaders campaigning ahead of the April 28 election, with both the incumbent Liberal Party and opposition Conservatives proposing tax cuts and incentives to encourage buyers and builders.
The outlook for new homes has also dimmed with the tariff threat. The value of residential-building permits issued in February fell 2.9% from a month prior, adding to a retreat in January that took back some of the surge in intentions in the final month of last year, Statistics Canada data last week showed.
With the debut of DeepSeek’s buzzy chatbot and updates to others, we tried applying the technology—and a little human common sense—to the most mind-melting aspect of home cooking: weekly meal planning.
The Italian marque has revealed its second High-Performance Electrified Vehicle, the 920CV Lamborghini Temerario, at a spectacular Sydney launch.