At Home in the High Desert

Mesa Sky Disk is just eleven miles from the National Park Joshua Tree entrance and closer still to La Copine, Pappy & Harriet’s, Noah Purifoy, the Integratron and all of downtown Yucca Valley. The cabin is secluded on a five acres and bordered by more than one hundred acres of wilderness on Yucca Mesa.

We designed this straw bale cabin to fit the land rather than designing a landscape around a structure. The cabin is compact by design so that we were able to build without displacing any native vegetation, while wrapping around mature Joshua Trees on land especially rich in plant diversity.

Green at Heart

This is a straw bale house: the stucco is natural lime from St. Astier in France, there is no plastic or vapor barriers in our 20″ straw bale walls, the foundation sills are redwood rather than pressure-treated lumber, and the stem wall uses reduced fly ash mix along with a unique engineering void, among other features.

If you are eager to find a place that has been designed from the ground up with ecology in mind, we hope you will appreciate the exceptional lengths we’ve gone to show that ecological building can function beautifully in California’s high desert.

The Desert in its Fullness

The site is green with Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia), Spanish dagger (Yucca gloriosa), Banana yucca (Yucca baccata), Narrowleaf yucca (Yucca glauca) and many cacti including Beavertail cactus (Opuntia basilaris), Strawberry Hedgehog cactus (Echinocereus engelmannii), Jumping cholla (Cylindropuntia fulgida), Pencil cholla (Cylindropuntia ramosissima), Wiggin’s cholla (Opuntia wigginsii).

Other notable flora includes Torrey Wolfberry (Lycium torreyi), Jojoba (Simmondsia chinensis), Desert Mallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua), Torrey’s Mormon Tea (Ephedra torreyana) and Paperbag bush (Salazaria Mexicana), among many other species.