Saguaro Sanctuary is a second home outside Tucson, Arizona, designed for a client whose primary residence sits among oaks and stone on the other side of the country.

A desert asks for a different vocabulary. The light is harder and more generous at once, the horizon and ancient saguaros do the work that architecture does elsewhere, and a room that would read as serene in Pennsylvania can read as timid here. The brief was not to bring an Eastern house west. It was to write this house in its own language, with a clear discipline about proportion and restraint still holding the sentences together.

That shows up in the furnishings. Generous, low seating in ivory and sand, so the view is never competing with the room. Cane, alabaster and aged bronze recur because each one takes strong light without hardening under it, and the seating went to a performance weave in ivory and sand that holds its color rather than fading toward grey.

The decisions were made from Evermore's Main Line studio, after Vivian Mulder flew to Tucson to experience and document the local colors: muted reds, golds and greens found in the desert landscape. The wood tones and finishes selected were samples approved in Pennsylvania in November, and they hold up just as well at four in the afternoon in the Arizona sun.

The art was collected for the place rather than for the walls. Horses, mountains, small framed landscapes with dust in them add to a cohesive story about the client.

This home away from home also reads as his, rather than as a style or as his designer's signature. For Vivian Mulder, that's the only outcome worth the work, whether the project is a new build, a full renovation, or a second home a couple of thousand miles from the studio.