Deep in the Moab canyons of Utah, a family of seven live a slow, desert-life away from the city.
“The eye has to travel,” as legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland famously declared. With its awe-inspiring views of Moab’s soaring vermilion cliffs, she would have been in raptures over this family home in Utah, USA. “The landscape is everything here,” says Susannah Holmberg, founder and creative director of Susannah Holmberg Studios. “It’s the backdrop, the wallpaper and central to the entire experience of the home.”
Jutting out from the base of a deep canyon, the house is home to a family of seven who relocated from the Pacific Northwest after falling in love with Moab and its desert landscape. When the reason for upping sticks is the location, it became imperative for Holmberg to ensure that “the red rock landscape became a main character in the house, in both the design approach and the colour palette.”
The family’s brief was to create a home that felt deeply integrated with the landscape, while avoiding the typical Southwestern tropes. Popularised in the 1940s at Turtle House, the renovated New Mexico home of Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers, the style was originally an homage to Pueblo culture, with Rogers hand-painting wooden beams with tribal motifs and placing Biedermeier furniture atop Navajo rugs. Today, Santa Fe design has become shorthand for terracotta tiles and walls, so for Holmberg and her team it became important not to deliver a trite interpretation of Southwest design, but instead “to look at how desert design is expressed globally, and for the design to be in constant conversation with the red-rock canyon setting.” The team achieved this by layering pattern, texture and vintage pieces to ground the project, finding, as Holmberg recalls, “a balance between new and vintage.”
Calibrating the interiors to the astonishing vistas outside meant using a nuanced palette of rust, plum and mineral blues, lifted with clever use of unconstrained wallpapers, including Mind The Gap’s Enchanted Woodland in green and taupe in the kitchen dining nook, and Studio Four NYC’s linen paper Petite Jaipur in lapis in the mud room at the rear of the house. The topographic-like views of the geological formations inform the material choices inside, with plaster walls and tiled surfaces, as well as the undulating brick ceiling in the kitchen.
With the furniture, Holmberg paired contemporary lines with vintage pieces to create a layered, collected feel, responding to the clients’ request that “the home should feel unique and original, as though it had been gathered over time.” A rich mix of woven textiles, velvets and shearling brings a tactile softness, highlighted in the primary bedroom, where a vintage tapestry sourced from 1stDibs hangs above the custom-made bed, itself covered in slubby throws from Slow Roads. It is a masterclass in slow canyon-living.
With its significant temperature swings, strong winds and heavy rains, designing for Moab’s intense climate was a challenge, but also an opportunity. “The sunlight in Moab is incredibly strong,” notes Holmberg, “which became a key consideration in the design. Using tile throughout helped with passive solar heating, the marble mosaic floors in the living room are a favourite detail.” That said, not all of nature can be contained. “We also had to contend with red dust,” laughs Holmberg, “which finds its way inside with surprising ease!”
After two and a half years from concept to completion, Holmberg and her team were delighted to find the result left the owners completely floored, and if a little of that red dust drifts in, it feels less like a nuisance than part of the point of living in this astonishing environment.
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