How midcentury ideas can be reimagined for the way we live today

Drive through Palm Springs and you’ll understand why architecture lovers keep coming back. The city is home to one of the world’s great collections of midcentury houses, many of which share a remarkably clear set of ideas: a close relationship with nature, thoughtful proportions, abundant natural light, durable materials, and architecture shaped around everyday life. At Desert House, Joël et Meelena Turkel reinterpreted those ideas for their own family, creating a home that reflects both the character of its desert setting and the way they wanted to live. 

For Joel and Meelena, cofounders of Conception turque, building their own home was more than a personal milestone. “It gave us the opportunity to turn the lens on ourselves—to become the client and identify how we can improve people’s lives through architecture,” says Meelena. 

Living in Desert House for the past eight years has given the Turkels a different perspective on their own work, allowing them to experience firsthand what works beautifully, what could work better, and how materials, systems, and details shape daily living. “It’s a place where we study better ways to live,” Meelena says. 

The Outside Comes In

The midcentury architects who shaped Palm Springs understood something that still feels remarkably current: nature can be part of the architecture rather than simply something to look at through a window. 

Desert House embraces that idea in a distinctly contemporary way. The home wraps around a central courtyard and pool, with the great room and all three bedroom suites opening directly onto the outdoor living space. Inside and out, materials are carefully carried across the threshold, softening the distinction between the two. Deep roof overhangs temper the intense desert sun, while windows and doors are positioned to capture the cooling breezes that move through the property. 

The result is a home where the landscape feels like an extension of everyday life, while the family remains comfortably protected from the desert climate. 

Making Every Inch Count

At just 2,110 square feet, Desert House is modest by the standards of a custom home. Yet the single-level plan feels remarkably generous. This kind of economy was central to the best midcentury residential architecture: rather than relying on sheer size, architects often used careful planning, strong connections between rooms, and a close relationship with the outdoors to make a home feel larger and more open than its footprint suggested.

The Turkels were equally intentional about how the rooms would support everyday life. “The primary goal was to make a comfortable, livable, beautiful home for our family,” Meelena explains. “We set out to design a home that would capture the wonder of its location, that would adapt to our needs as they change, that would feel authentic to us, and that would enable us to live our best lives. And for eight years and counting, it has.” 

That idea of adaptability appears throughout the house, sometimes in unexpected ways. 

Designed for Real Life

One of the Turkels’ favorite features is a living platform that runs from inside the great room into the courtyard. Conceptually simple but carefully engineered, it gives a single architectural element several lives. 

Tucked inside, it works as a window seat. Slide the glass wall into its pocket and the platform becomes a poolside lounge, or an outdoor extension of the living room sofa. Clear the cushions and it becomes a stage for an evening performance or a surface for the kids’ art projects. 

That flexibility also reflects an important midcentury idea: that a well-designed home should support changing patterns of everyday life rather than dictate exactly how a room must be used. 

“It is the place in the house that everyone chooses to sit with a book or take a nap,” says Meelena, “because when you’re in it, it feels like your own private space where you can enjoy the best view.” 

This captures a theme running throughout Desert House: the best details are not necessarily the most elaborate. They are the ones that quietly make a home more comfortable, and more personal.

Building with Confidence

Before construction began, Turkel Design built a complete 3D digital model of Desert House and its site, allowing the team to study sun angles, sightlines, and the relationship between the house and its surroundings. That model then guided the fabrication and assembly of the home. 

The components were fabricated offsite in a climate-controlled facility and shipped to Palm Springs for precision assembly by a local builder. The structural shell went up in just 32 days, as shown in the time-lapse video above. 

For Joel and Meelena, the value of this process goes beyond efficiency. It reduces one of the biggest sources of anxiety in custom construction: uncertainty. By making critical decisions and coordinating the work before materials arrive onsite, the process gives clients greater confidence in what they are getting, how it will come together, and what it will cost. 

“By the time the building components are delivered to the site, we have confidence that the home will come together efficiently and correctly, that the materials will be of high quality, and that it will cost what we anticipated,” Meelena says. 

That confidence is precisely what the Turkels want their clients to have. 

Refining the Process

Desert House is one expression of a process Turkel Design has been refining for decades. As technology advances, the firm continually evaluates and improves the way it designs, models, fabricates, and builds, with each project contributing to a more precise and predictable process for the next. 

That approach has informed more than 300 homes across North America and beyond, from mountain retreats to vineyard homes to year-round residences. 

If you’re dreaming of a custom home shaped around the way you want to live, please contact us using the form below. We’d love to hear what you’re imagining.