California firm OPA has completed a house for the rolling desert landscape of Nevada, with slanted zinc-clad sections intended to appear as an extension of the terrain.
Shapeshifter House is a three-storey family home that spans 5,900 square feet (548 square metres) across an arid site, complete with views of the Sierra Nevada mountains and Reno in the distance.

Based in San Francisco, Ogrydziak Prillinger Architects (OPA) built the house for two art collectors and dealers, who specialise in contemporary works and pieces from the American West.
"They wanted a house that would both reflect the contemporary moment and be explicitly of the West," said the firm.

To design a suitable project, OPA referenced notions regularly associated with the American frontier and the Southwest desert. Themes of experimentation, futurism, otherness, and the visual of a barren wasteland were all cited by the studio. "Enduringly mercurial, [the desert] is a sandbox that changes forms to fit the imaginations of the user, a space of ambivalence and uncertainty," said the firm.

As a result, the house was designed with a highly contemporary and angular form, which is intended to merge into the surrounding landscape.
"We reshaped the site into anticlines and synclines, dunes and blowouts, and gradually the form of the house emerged with the terrain," the firm said.

Sculpted earth mounds surround the home, with portions form its roof. These heaps of earth, along with...