casa azzurra’s tonal blue stucco blends into the joshua tree sky

Living Within the Joshua Tree Landscape

Casa Azzurra, a newly built architectural retreat in Joshua Tree, challenges traditional notions of the desert home, offering a spatial experience rooted in memory, place, and sensorial immersion. Designed by Mirtilla Alliata di Montereale — an Italian architect raised in Hawaii and trained at SCI-Arc — the project is deeply personal. It draws on her childhood summers in the Aeolian Islands, professional collaborations with Frank Gehry and Kulapat Yantrasast, and a reverence for the elemental landscapes of Joshua Tree. With a facade of soft blue, the project marks the first in a future hospitality brand and a framework for exploring architecture as lived narrative.

images © Katia Grozov

casa azzurra camouflages with the desert sky

Sprawling across ten desert acres in Joshua Tree, Casa Azzurra is organized around the idea of expansion, both spatially and sensorially. With the design of the retreat, Italian architect Mirtilla Alliata di Montereale does not attempt to compete with the desert. Instead, she leans into it, framing long views and working with elevation to create moments of subtle drama. Set on a rare slope with views toward the mountain range of Joshua Tree National Park, the building opens up through sliding glass walls and view corridors, allowing the interior to feel as though it’s breathing with the land. A palette of five tonal blues coats the cat-face stucco exterior, designed to shift with the sky. It’s a camouflage that also celebrates color in a landscape dominated by neutral tones.

Casa Azzurra is a desert retreat in Joshua Tree designed by architect Mirtilla Alliata di Montereale

the cobalt-wrapped courtyard

At the heart of Casa Azzurra, a vivid cobalt-blue courtyard sets the tone for the home’s spatial rhythm. Rather than following a minimalist desert typology typical of Joshua Tree, Alliata di Montereale leans into a richer, more theatrical approach — one that honors both vernacular Mediterranean sensibilities and the experimental lineage of Californian architecture. The courtyard acts as a hinge between public and private realms, a luminous anchor that infuses the surrounding rooms with saturated reflections and a sense of spatial choreography. This central space embodies the project’s core ambition: to make architecture feel both grounded and transportive.

the project draws inspiration from Aeolian summers, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the surrounding desert

The interior embraces texture and chromatic variety with deliberate precision. Jewel-toned bedrooms — each with its own palette drawn from the architect’s Italian heritage — punctuate the otherwise open and flowing floorplan. These rooms do not simply decorate but narrate: a dialogue between deep greens, ochres, lapis, and terracotta unfolds through linens, built-ins, and Murano glass accents. Tactile richness defines the atmosphere — linen, raw wood, and stone layer into spaces that are at once elevated and comfortable. Dali prints and skylit rain showers add surrealist touches and moments of intimacy with the natural world, inviting slow movement and contemplative pause.

the property spans ten acres and is positioned on a rare slope with views of Joshua Tree National Park

Extending outward from the main residence, Casa Azzurra continues through a series of architectural interventions. A minimalist guest retreat sits like a desert observatory, its wood-paneled interior framing the night sky. Landscape and architecture merge in Geoponika’s enclosed garden, a sanctuary within a sanctuary, where desert planting enhances the experience of enclosure and openness. A thirty-foot pool, bocce and pickleball courts, and an outdoor dining area are not amenities in the conventional sense — they are elements of a larger compositional field that encourages movement, gathering, and improvisation. Here, architecture serves life not as backdrop, but as collaborator.

the exterior is finished in five shades of blue, echoing the changing sky and desert light