The town of Taos in New Mexico has long attracted people searching for alternatives to conventional American life. Artists, seekers, off-grid idealists and burnt-out urbanites continue to arrive with the hope that the region’s vast landscape and distance from the cultural mainstream might make room for different social and ecological possibilities.
On Honda Mesa, that impulse found physical form in a 1980s home commissioned by archaeologist Karen Young. The arrowhead-shaped dwelling emerged from a building culture that made northern New Mexico synonymous with ecological fantasy and countercultural reinvention. The best-known expression of this movement is the ‘Earthship’: a self-sufficient house model developed by architect Michael E. Reynolds in the 1970s using recycled materials, thermal mass and natural systems. Partially submerged into the mesa, Young’s home incorporated many of the principles that made Earthships a regional phenomenon. Before her death in 2015, the property functioned as an alpaca ranch and informal gathering place for Taos’s community of artists, makers, ranchers and alternative builders drawn to new ways of living with the land.
The home’s current owner, John Sharp, has continued that tradition. When WoI visits over Memorial Day weekend, the Los Angeles-based landscape designer is hosting an annual open house that takes on the quality of a temporary commune. Mask-making sessions, mescal tastings, communal meals and workshops blur the boundaries between wellness retreat, artist residency and backyard barbecue.
The festivities begin with a conversation between ecological builders Wayne Rutherford and Patricia Martinez Rutherford, the former of whom was commissioned by Young to build the arrowhead house. A semicircular flight of stairs descending towards the bedrooms has been repurposed as an informal amphitheatre, where Wayne, now in his seventies, guides the audience through the lore of the place he built four decades earlier.
A young handyman newly arrived from Northern California at the time, he relied largely on Pumice-Crete, a volcanic material mixed and poured by hand into forms on site. ‘This home was like my master’s degree,’ he recalls. He was inspired by A Pattern Language, a seminal architectural text exploring how buildings can shape community, daily rituals and a deeper relationship with place. Many of the book’s lessons remain visible to this day. Public and private spaces unfold gradually across different levels; gathering areas widen before narrowing into darker, more secluded rooms. The architecture is organised around emotional transition, moving from exposure to retreat, communal life to temporary seclusion. Even now, those spatial ideas remain active, shaping how guests circulate through the house and continually drawing them back together.
When Sharp first viewed the house, in early 2022, he remembers thinking: ‘What the fuck? Where am I?’ Previous buyers had apparently backed out after discovering ‘the walls are mud’. For him, that was precisely the point. The attraction was more than aesthetic. Through his studio, Sharp is known for conjuring immersive environments that blur the boundaries between architecture, landscape and social life. Less interested in conventional landscape design than in what he calls ‘experiential outdoor living’, he strives to create places where people can ‘grow up with and grow into’ their surroundings. Though his clients have come to include pop stars and actors, he remains more interested in the lives his projects support than the names attached to them. ‘You can design someone’s whole life,’ he says. ‘A lot of projects have outdoor showers, food programmes, chicken coops. It’s not like rewilding. It’s like refinding your centre again in life.’
On that first visit, small coincidences began to feel like signs: a poster from the 1989 Taos Film Festival hung on the wall – the year Sharp was born – while the Talking Heads song ‘This Must Be the Place’ played in the background. ‘I spent the next 900 miles on the road back to Los Angeles thinking about the arrowhead,’ he recalls. He bought the house a few months later.
Young had already died by the time Sharp encountered the house, yet her presence continued to circulate through it. Her closest friend lives next door and spends afternoons on the porch, telling Sharp stories of the unexpected visitors Young welcomed over the years (including, on one occasion, a busload of stranded nuns).
Inside, Sharp’s belief that personal mythology and context matter more than the pursuit of a perfectly resolved interior is illustrated by a medley of possessions gathered through years of movement between Arizona, New Mexico, California and Texas, which sit beside objects entrusted to the house by Young’s children. Salvaged-log furniture stands next to stained-glass lighting sourced in Sedona, inherited hats, dream catchers and desert ceramics. The effect feels surprisingly inevitable, as though each object had been waiting for the others to arrive.
At the entrance, a Carlo Mollino ‘Milo CM’ mirror cut into the silhouette of the Venus de Milo catches the setting sun. ‘I like things that have a story,’ Sharp says: things made by Taos locals, desert artists or vintage pieces sourced by friends. One cabinet, which he refers to as ‘Mexican Sottsass’ (it bears a striking resemblance to the architect’s ‘Casablanca’ sideboard), serves as a conceptual anchor; the Memphis group drew inspiration from American vernacular culture, transforming regional references into international design. This cabinet appears to reverse the process, preserving the form of a design classic while bringing it closer to the traditions that inspired it, returning the piece to a rougher, local register. On the porch, a pair of Keith Haring-esque metal chairs stand watch. Wind chimes from Arcosanti (WoI March 2026) sound through the open windows as the mountains disappear into violet light. ‘Nothing matches and somehow it works,’ Sharp reflects.
The open house closes with a set from the synth-pop trio Dallas Acid, who perform from the back porch, transformed by Sharp into a makeshift stage. Guests sink into ‘Adirondack’ chairs of his design and blankets spread across the lawn as the mesa slips into evening. At one point, Sharp waves me towards an empty spot before drifting back into the crowd, pleased to have become a guest at his own gathering.
What distinguishes the house is not the long-term success of its experimental architecture, however seductive, but its ability to generate communal life. Sustainability, after all, requires more than ecological ingenuity. A building must possess enough charm and personality to inspire stewardship beyond its creators. Young imagined the house. Rutherford materialised it. Sharp understands his place within that lineage. ‘I have a place that I stay in LA, but this is my home,’ he says. ‘This is where my heart feels. This house feels like it was created to bring people together’.
A version of this article appears in the August 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers.
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