Desert Harmony: Wendi Young Crafts a Warm Contemporary Home in the Santa Rosa Mountains

A large white house with palm trees in the front yard.

Blending contemporary architecture with warmth and texture, interior designer Wendi Young transforms a 7,500-square-foot Santa Rosa Mountains home into a serene, art-filled desert retreat that balances scale, style and soul.

Framed by the dramatic Santa Rosa Mountains, this 7,500-square-foot residence was designed to feel both striking and livable. The clients came with a straightforward yet complex vision: They wanted a home that was expansive yet inviting, contemporary yet warm. For interior designer Wendi Young, principal of Wendi Young Design, the challenge was translating these seemingly contradictory desires into a cohesive living environment. Through what she describes as a symbiotic collaboration, Young created something that exceeded expectations while honoring both the desert setting and the family’s lifestyle needs.

“This project was truly a team effort,” Young points out. “The architect was very good at communicating his vision and allowing the rest of us to support that vision in our own way with our individual expertise. Since the client had experienced the construction process many times, that too made the current process very collaborative.”

A Client’s Vision Reimagined
The homeowners came to the project with clear priorities. “The client wanted a warm, light-filled contemporary home with wide open spaces for family and friends to gather,” Young notes. “They also brought furnishings from their previous life on the East Coast and an impressive art collection they had amassed over the years. Since they were moving from a traditional-style home in Virginia, we needed to reimagine a few of their original pieces to blend with the new contemporary aesthetic.

The designer has mastered the challenge of creating warmth within contemporary architecture throughout her career. This balance is not simply a design strategy but a guiding principle for Young.

“Creating a warm, inviting living environment has always been a design ethos I follow, no matter the style or aesthetic,” she says. “In this home, we scaled the furnishings to fill the space, used textured fabrics and finishes, and added earthy materials with an ethnic influence to juxtapose the contemporary details used by the architect.”

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Making Large Feel Livable
With such a generous scale, one obstacle was ensuring that the vast rooms did not feel sparse or too overwhelming. Young’s solution was to work in harmony with the size of the architecture rather than against it. “I find homes of this scale feel more inviting with large-scale furniture and plenty of upholstered pieces,” she explains. “We also fill the room and add layers of accessories unless we intentionally want a space to feel spare or evocative.”

A living room with a white brick wall and white furniture.

In practice, this meant incorporating a combination of custom furniture, richly textured textiles and carefully placed details that soften the architectural precision. The result is a sense of intimacy within grandeur, where each room invites use rather than admiration from a distance.

This approach to scale also informed Young’s color and materials strategy. Although the overall palette leans toward neutral, her understanding of visual rhythm and energy ensured that the interiors are far from muted. Black marble accents, most notably in the bar, introduce a striking counterpoint. “We will use a bold statement to instill a little energy shift … in areas we want to invoke a little more drama, excitement, or create that ‘wow’ moment,” Young remarks. “That same bar designed with a cream-colored stone and light metal finishes would have been pretty but quiet, and the clients definitely did not want quiet.”

This practice of including strategic drama extends beyond materials to custom details throughout. “All the architectural details and almost all of the furnishings were custom-made for this home,” Young notes. Highlights include a custom pool table, shuffleboard table, and Gregorius Pineo and Holly Hunt furnishings.

Lighting, too, was treated with bespoke care. “When selecting lighting for a project, especially one as open as this home, I spend a lot of time making sure they all speak nicely to one another. I strive to create a rhythm with size, scale, material and style from one room to the next.”

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A Dialogue with the Desert
The desert doesn’t just provide a backdrop; it becomes a design partner, and Young ensured it had a voice in every decision. “Both the landscape and the natural light were dominant considerations and influenced every choice we made,” she recounts. “The view from this location was spectacular, and we didn’t want anything to detract from it, neither architecturally nor decoratively. The color palette, material selections and furnishings were selected specifically to enhance the view.”

To further integrate indoors and outdoors, the architect designed a series of pivot and pocket doors that dissolve boundaries. Young’s interior choices reinforced this seamless connection. “The floor-to-ceiling wall of pivot doors to the interior courtyard and pocket doors to the backyard and golf course open the entire space. Using the same limestone paving material both inside and outside further blurs the boundary between the two.”

A bedroom with textured wallpaper and neutral finishes.

A Testament to Collaboration
The project’s success stems from what Young thinks is often the most challenging aspect of custom home design. “Designing custom homes is fraught with them,” she admits, referring to the inevitable obstacles. “It helps when you have a good team and a great client to collectively find solutions.” The result is a home that exceeds the client’s original vision, proving that the most successful designs emerge not from individual brilliance but from genuine collaboration. Ultimately, this shared vision resulted in a residence that feels both monumental and intimate, contemporary yet timeless and a true sanctuary that honors its desert setting.

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