Desert by Design: Creative Minds, Arid Places, Tailor-Made Spaces

Desert by Design celebrates the interior worlds that exist in Earth’s most arid climes and, more importantly, the creative minds who inhabit them

Marfa, Texas-based desert dwellers Molly Mandell and James Burke traveled the world to explore and photograph thirty incredible spaces. They made their way through the southwestern United States, to Mexico and Argentina, and to Morocco, Jordan, the Canary Islands, Rajasthan India, and even a micro-desert in New Zealand.

They visited high desert and low desert, urban desert and rural desert, sandy desert and scrubby desert. They photographed everything from iconic properties inhabited by Yves Saint Laurent, César Manrique, and Donald Judd to thoughtfully curated, centuries-old adobe structures and modern, groundbreaking ones, all the while interviewing the choreographers, hoteliers, sculptors, environmentalists, chefs, audio engineers, and preservationists who bring them to life.