Perched on a private 5-acre ridge above the red-rock canyons of Southern Utah, Oasis at Santa Clara is designed for multi-generational vacation living. The home prioritizes the feeling of home while maintaining the flexibility needed for gatherings of 40+ guests.
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Below is a record of how this project took shape — including key decisions, tradeoffs, and lessons along the way.
Key milestones and decisions as this project progressed.
Those yellow ducts running in through the window openings are temporary cooling. Through a southern Utah summer—with drywall sanding, tile setting, millwork, and finish carpentry all going at once—the house has to stay cool and dry for the work and the materials. So we rent the equipment and duct it in from outside rather than starting up the home's own HVAC system.
The system sitting in this house will spend the next twenty years moving the air a family breathes every night. The free option during construction is to switch it on early and let it condition the house through the finish trades. That is also how a brand-new system spends its first season inhaling drywall dust, sawdust, and joint-compound powder—fine particulate that coats the evaporator coil, loads the blower wheel, and settles deep into ductwork nobody will ever reach again. A coil is far harder to clean properly than it is to keep clean in the first place. For the people who move in, the cost of getting that wrong isn't really a performance number on a spec sheet. It's that the first year of air in their new home arrives through everything the trades left behind, recirculated every time the system runs.
On a home at this level we budget temporary cooling as its own line item and keep the permanent system sealed until the house is clean. It costs real money and disappears completely when the house is finished. That's exactly the point: the permanent HVAC system belongs to the homeowner, not to the construction process, so we protect it until the house is ready for it. A home should be good to breathe in on the day the family walks through the door—not eventually, after a few seasons of filter changes.
Orange Schluter DITRA-HEAT membrane went down across the baths, with electric heating cable clipped into the studs of the mat in a serpentine pattern. The membrane is bonded to the substrate, the cable sits in the mat without staples or fasteners, and the floor sensor is run back to its thermostat before a single tile is set.
Two things are happening in that one layer. The heat is the obvious one—tile takes the temperature of whatever sits under it, and a bath floor over a slab stays cold well past the actual cold season. Cable-in-mat warms the tile predictably and keeps it comfortable underfoot. The membrane is the part nobody ever sees: DITRA uncouples the tile from the substrate, isolating movement and stress between the two so the finished floor is far less likely to telegraph what the slab does, and it holds the cable at a consistent depth so the heat comes up evenly instead of pooling in spots.
The cheap way to heat a tile floor is to bury cable in a bed of thinset and hope it stays put. Setting it into an uncoupling membrane costs more per square foot and adds a day, but it buys stress isolation and even heat in the same layer—and it keeps the cable where we can lay it out and see it, right up until the tile covers it.
The exterior is going on in three materials at once. Crates of natural stone landed and were staged around the house by the elevation they belong to, the stucco scratch and brown coats are on across the arched entry and the upper mass, and Hardie soffit is wrapping the deep overhangs and the exposed beam tails. Before the masons touched the house itself, we built a test wall—a mock-up panel of the actual stone with the actual grout.
Natural stone doesn't arrive uniform. Every crate is its own mix of color, thickness, and shape, and stone that looked right on a sample board can read completely differently across a twenty-foot elevation in desert sun. Grout matters just as much—the same stone with a light joint and a dark joint are two different buildings. A test wall is the only way to see both of those decisions at full scale while they're still reversible. Stucco has the opposite problem: it's continuous, so every control joint, arch radius, and termination against another material has to be right before the color coat locks it in. And the fiber-cement soffit does the quiet work—it won't rot, cup, or feed anything on an overhang nobody will easily reach again.
Approve stone and grout on a mock-up, never on a sample board. That approved panel then becomes the benchmark every interface gets coordinated against—where the stone lines land, where the stucco terminates, where the soffit closes it out. Three cladding materials meeting on a single elevation is where most exteriors come apart, and the difference is whether those interfaces were coordinated from one reference or negotiated in the field.
The tile crew is running four different floors at once and none of them repeat. Large-format porcelain in the back-of-house spaces, a hand-set octagon-and-dot marble in a bath, honed dark marble carried to a flush wood transition, and a crazy-cut pattern where every stone is scribed to the ones beside it on site.
Patterns like the octagon-and-dot and the crazy cut don't come out of a box square. Someone has to lay the field out dry, find the center, and decide where the cuts land at every doorway, wall, and drain before anything is committed. Get that layout wrong and the room ends on a sliver of tile at its most visible wall. The flush wood-to-tile transitions are the same problem from the other direction—two materials have to land at exactly the same height, which means the substrate under each one was planned before either was ordered.
We dry-lay every custom floor before we commit the field in thinset, and we set the transitions first and work back from them. It's slow, and it's the only way a floor like the crazy cut reads as intentional instead of improvised.
Forms and steel are up for the main pool—a 25' × 50' shell built to carry two water slides. Before any concrete goes in, the walls are tied out in rebar, every return, skimmer, main drain, and slide feed is plumbed and braced inside the cage, and the whole assembly is squared to the back of the house. The slide footings and bond beam are formed and tied into the shell itself rather than added on afterward.
A pool is a structure, not a hole. Everything that ends up buried in that concrete—plumbing runs, bonding wire, slide anchors—has to be exactly right now, because the only way to correct it later is a saw and a jackhammer. Two slides also mean real anchorage and point loads at the top of the shell, so the steel and the footings beneath them get sized for that up front instead of being bolted onto a shell that was never designed to hold them.
We walk a pool before the pour the same way we walk the house's foundation: check the steel, confirm every penetration against the plan, and sign off on the layout while it's all still visible. The exciting part of a pool is the last two weeks. The part that decides whether it's still tight in thirty years is this one.
Hung drywall throughout the home—you can finally read the rooms as rooms, with the great room's tray ceiling, the media niche, and the stair hall all taking shape. But not every "wall" here is drywall: in wet areas like the showers and tub surround we used a glass-mat cement tile backer board (the black GlasRoc panels) instead of standard drywall.
Standard drywall has a paper face and a gypsum core that fail when they get wet—exactly the wrong material behind tile in a shower. The glass-mat tile backer is moisture- and mold-resistant and gives tile a stable, waterproof substrate to bond to. Using it where it's needed—and regular drywall everywhere else—is a small detail that prevents big problems years down the road.
It's tempting to treat "board on the walls" as one step, but the substrate has to match the room. We mapped every wet wall—showers, the tub surround, splash zones—for tile backer and waterproofing, and kept drywall for the dry rooms. Get the backer right now and the tile, and everything behind it, lasts.
Detailed the home's arches—a barrel-vaulted gallery running down the entry hall, a series of arched doorways marching through it, arched niches set into the walls, and arched window openings framing the desert. Each curve is hand-built in framing and then carefully wrapped in drywall to hold a true, fair radius.
Arches and barrel vaults are some of the hardest shapes to execute in drywall. A barrel vault is a continuous curved ceiling that has to stay smooth and consistent the entire length of the hall; the arched openings and niches each have to match and align. There's no trim to hide behind—the drywall itself has to be perfect. It's slow, skilled work that turns a hallway into a procession.
These curves were planned from framing, with curved blocking and drywall bent to shape. The payoff is architecture you feel as you move through the house—the rhythm of arches down the gallery, the soft barrel ceiling overhead, and niches that turn walls into display. It's the kind of detail that reads as timeless rather than trendy.
Look up in the great room and the tray ceiling is sheathed in plywood instead of drywall. That's intentional. Before the finished ceiling goes in, we covered the entire ceiling field in plywood to create a continuous, solid backing across the whole surface.
The finished ceiling here gets a wood treatment, and a wood ceiling needs something solid to fasten to—everywhere, not just where a joist happens to land. Drywall alone can't hold it. A full plywood deck lets the finish carpenters fasten cleanly at any point, hold everything dead-flat, and carry the weight without sag. It also gives the recessed lights and any ceiling-mounted detail a firm substrate.
Sheathing a whole ceiling in plywood is extra material and labor most homes skip, but it's the right base for a real wood ceiling. Matching the substrate to the finish—plywood where the wood lands, drywall everywhere else—is what lets the finished ceiling look seamless and stay flat for the life of the home.
Laid down the base layer on the rooftop deck—the smooth gray coating across the surface and up the access stairs. This is the waterproofing and prep coat, not the finish. It seals the deck and creates the even, monolithic substrate the final surface bonds to. Right now it's one continuous plane, parapets still in ZIP sheathing, the red-rock mountains and valley wide open beyond.
A rooftop deck lives in full desert sun and weather, so the waterproofing under the finish is everything—it's what keeps water out of the living space below for the life of the home. Getting this layer flat, continuous, and fully sealed (including the stair treads down to the deck door) is what makes the finished surface both watertight and good-looking.
The finish on top will be a stamped epoxy system, troweled and tooled to read like large-format tiles—the look of a tiled terrace without the grout lines and failure points of real tile on a roof. Stamped epoxy over a monolithic waterproof base means a seamless, joint-free deck that shrugs off rooftop heat and movement far better than individual tiles would. This gray coat is the unglamorous step that makes that finish possible.
Insulated the home with three products, each matched to its assembly. Open-cell spray foam went in at the roofline and ceilings—the cream-colored foam expanded between the rafters—creating a sealed, conditioned envelope. The exterior framed walls were filled with blown-in insulation that packs every cavity around every wire and pipe with no gaps. And the exterior concrete walls were insulated with batts.
Each is doing something specific. Open-cell foam at the roof deck seals the envelope and tames desert heat far better than a vented attic. The blown-in insulation in the framed exterior walls eliminates the voids that loose batts leave around obstructions—better real-world performance. And batts on the exterior concrete walls add a thermal break across the masonry, so the concrete doesn't pull heat and cold straight into the finished rooms.
We deliberately matched the insulation to each assembly instead of defaulting to one product—foam to seal the roof, blown-in to fill the framed walls, and batts to blanket the concrete. In a high-desert climate, a tight, gap-free envelope across every surface is what keeps the home comfortable and efficient through 110-degree summers and cold desert nights.
Before insulation and drywall went up, we had the entire home 3D-scanned with Matterport—capturing every room, wall cavity, and ceiling while all the rough-in was still exposed. The result is a navigable "dollhouse" model and walk-through with every stud, wire, pipe, and duct visible, and we hand the full scan to the homeowner.
Once drywall closes the walls, what's behind them disappears—until someone needs to hang a TV, move a fixture, or chase a leak. A Matterport scan of the rough state is a permanent X-ray of the house: we (the builder) and the owners can both look up exactly where a wire, pipe, or piece of blocking sits behind any finished wall, for the life of the home. It turns "I think there's a stud about there" into certainty.
We scan every project at rough-in and give the owner the model—not just the builder. It's a small step that pays off for decades: future remodels, repairs, and even hanging art get easier and safer when you can see through the walls. Documentation now prevents demolition later.
Poured gypcrete underlayment across the floors, over the AdvanTech subfloor. The result is the smooth, monolithic gray surface in every room—it reads exactly like a poured concrete slab, but it's actually gypcrete, a gypsum-based self-leveling underlayment. It flows out level on its own and cures hard, dense, and dead-flat.
Gypcrete does things a concrete topping can't do as easily on an upper floor. It self-levels to a perfectly flat plane—critical before stone, tile, and wide-plank flooring that telegraph every dip. It deadens sound between levels so footsteps don't carry downstairs, adds fire resistance, and is the standard bed for embedding radiant floor heat. All at a fraction of the weight of a structural concrete pour.
We chose gypcrete over a heavier concrete topping precisely because of that weight: a full concrete pour on a wood-framed upper level is a major structural load, while gypcrete gives us a flatter, quieter floor without it. Pouring now—after rough-in, before finishes—leaves every room a clean, level, ready-to-finish surface. What looks like an industrial concrete floor is really a precision substrate for the finishes to come.
Pulled the home-run wiring for a whole-home Lutron system. Every switch leg and fixture is run back as its own home run to a central lighting-control panel—the bundle of red and white conductors landing on the backboard—rather than daisy-chained the conventional way, with a structured-wiring sub-panel tying in the home's data and low-voltage.
Full Lutron means every light and the motorized shades run from elegant keypads, app, or schedules instead of walls cluttered with switches. Centralizing the loads on a panel is what makes that possible—far more wiring than a standard home, which is why it has to be pulled now, at rough-in, while the walls are open.
Pre-wiring for full Lutron is a commitment you can't bolt on later—the home-run topology has to exist before drywall. We mapped every keypad and fixture load to the panel up front, so the finished home has clean, minimal switching and dimmable scenes for living, entertaining, and the desert light through those big glass walls.
Sheathed the entire floor system in AdvanTech subflooring—the high-density, moisture-resistant panels stamped across every room. Tongue-and-groove sheets were glued and screwed to the joists on both levels, giving a flat, stiff, continuous deck to build on.
Subfloor is an invisible choice you feel for the life of the house. AdvanTech is denser and far more moisture-resistant than standard OSB or plywood—it shrugs off rain, dust, and a high-desert climate's swings during the months it sits exposed, without swelling, cupping, or delaminating at the edges. That stiffness is what kills squeaks and bounce before any finish goes down.
We spec'd it house-wide, not just in wet areas, because this home carries heavy finishes—stone floors, the marble tub, tile—that demand a dead-flat, rock-solid base with minimal deflection. The panels carry a lifetime warranty (including against edge swell), so spending a little more at the subfloor stage protects every finish above it. Flat, quiet, and stable—exactly what belongs under a forever home.
Roughed in the home's HVAC system—sheet-metal ductwork, plenums, insulated trunk lines, and the mechanical equipment that feeds it. This is no token system: the home runs eight separate HVAC units, zoned so every part of the house can be dialed in independently. Supply air is delivered through recessed linear slot diffusers rather than the usual rectangular grilles.
Here's something most people don't realize: a lot of homes in Southern Utah aren't actually engineered for HVAC—they're sized by rule of thumb and come up short against 110-degree summers. We had this system properly engineered, with loads calculated room by room. Eight zoned units mean the house genuinely stays cool everywhere, even at the peak of a desert afternoon, instead of fighting hot spots.
We also chose linear diffusers over standard grilles—a clean, recessed slot that disappears into the ceiling for a sleek, uninterrupted look—but they have to be planned and ducted for at rough-in. Engineering the system and committing to eight units up front costs more now, but it's the difference between a house that's merely air-conditioned and one that's genuinely comfortable in any room, in any weather.
Ran the plumbing rough-in throughout—PEX supply lines (the red and white runs for hot and cold), PVC drain-waste-vent stacks, and the in-wall valve bodies for showers and fixtures. You can see a Brizo shower valve set into its wall and supply manifolds stubbed out at the baths and kitchen, with fixture plans taped to the framing as a guide.
Rough-in is where the entire water system is laid out before the walls close. Getting drain slopes, vent routing, and supply locations exactly right now—against the actual fixture plans—is what prevents problems you can't reach later. Home-run PEX manifolds also let each fixture be isolated and deliver consistent pressure.
We set valve heights and fixture rough locations off the real finish plans, not assumptions, so tubs, showers, and faucets land exactly where the design intends. With premium fixtures like Brizo going in, the rough-in has to be dead-on—every stub-out was placed to the spec sheet.
Set the main floating staircase—a fabricated steel structure built around a single central spine (a mono-stringer) with treads cantilevering off either side. The stringer was shop-welded, brought to site in sections, and field-welded together at the mid-landing where the run switches back. Each tread floats off the central beam with no visible support beneath.
A mono-stringer floating stair is structurally demanding—one central beam carries the entire load and has to resist the twist of treads cantilevering off both sides. The steel is heavily engineered and precisely welded; there's no second stringer or wall to hide behind. The payoff is a sculptural, open stair that lets light and the canyon view pass right through it.
We dry-fit the raw steel now, during framing, while the structure is open for welding and access. Treads get clad later. Coordinating the fabricator's shop drawings with our framing—especially the landing connections and the window beyond—is what lets the stair read as one clean line from floor to floor.
Set the primary bath's centerpiece—a solid soaking tub hand-carved from a single block of Turkish marble, weighing roughly 2,000 pounds. Far too heavy and too large to ever fit through a finished doorway, it was flown in through the open framing on a telehandler, rigged in straps, and lowered onto the subfloor.
A monolithic stone tub can't be installed late in the build—it has to go in while the walls are still open. Placing it now, during framing, is the only practical window. Miss it, and the tub simply doesn't get in.
We coordinated the crane-in around the framing schedule and confirmed the floor below was engineered to carry the concentrated load before the tub arrived. Sequencing a 2,000-pound fixture this early is the difference between a signature feature and an expensive problem.
Window and door packages went in this week, including the large multi-panel sliding glass wall systems that define the main living spaces. The black-framed sliders span entire corners and full walls, each unit set, shimmed, and sealed into the Zip System openings to keep the air and water barrier continuous. Even unfinished, the glass frames uninterrupted views of the red-rock canyons and the valley below.
These sliding glass walls are the heart of the home's indoor-outdoor concept. When open, they dissolve the line between the interior and the surrounding desert. Setting them plumb, level, and watertight at this scale is exacting—any misalignment shows across a 20-plus-foot run of glass.
The flush, step-free transition from interior floor to outdoor patio was planned at the engineering stage, not improvised on site. We built a recess into the concrete slabs where these door systems land, so the track sits below the finished floor line. The payoff is a seamless threshold—no lip to step over—reading as one continuous plane from inside to out. Designing that slab pocket months earlier, back at foundation, is exactly what makes the finished detail possible.
Framed the home's sculptural curved staircase. Each tread and riser was cut and set around the radius, with a continuous laminated stringer wrapping the open side. It's rough plywood for now, but the geometry—the sweep of the turn and a consistent rise—is locked in at this stage.
A curved stair is one of the hardest things to frame well. Every tread is a slightly different shape, and the curved stringer has to be laminated and bent to a true, fair line. Nail the framing and the finish material later lays on cleanly; miss it and every finish fights the geometry.
We built it in plywood first to prove the curve, rise, and headroom—walking the stair and adjusting while changes are still cheap, before committing to finish materials.
Started wood framing on the basement level. Exterior walls going up and Zip System sheathing being properly installed with taped seams for a continuous air and water barrier. Interior partition layout marked and first walls standing.
Framing transforms the concrete shell into recognizable spaces. Zip System combines structural sheathing with a built-in weather-resistant barrier, eliminating the need for house wrap and reducing air infiltration.
Zip System was chosen for its integrated WRB and superior air sealing. The basement level sets the pace for the rest of the build.
Erected structural steel columns and beams for the basement level. Steel moment frames at large openings provide lateral support. All connections welded and inspected per structural engineer specifications.
The open floor plan requires steel to span distances that wood can't handle efficiently. These moment frames also resist seismic and wind loads.
Coordinated steel delivery with crane availability to minimize idle time. Steel erection completed in two days with proper staging.
Completed continuous footings and basement slab pour. Underslab plumbing and electrical conduits installed and tested before concrete. Waterproofing membrane applied to exterior foundation walls.
The basement houses the game room, sauna and cold plunge, gym, and mechanical equipment. Getting the underslab utilities right is critical—there's no going back once the concrete is in.
Used Stego Wrap vapor barrier over compacted road base for underslab moisture control. Stego Wrap is a true below-slab vapor barrier (not just a retarder) that blocks moisture migration. The road base provides a stable, well-draining substrate that won't puncture the membrane and allows the slab to cure evenly.
Poured the post-tension slab for the pickleball court before starting the main house foundation. This separate structure required its own engineering for the flat, crack-free surface needed for court play.
Building the court first allowed the concrete to cure and cables to be tensioned while we focused on the main house. A pickleball court has zero tolerance for cracks or unevenness.
Sequencing the court pour first was driven by site logistics—we needed that area clear to get equipment access for pouring the basement slab and constructing the 12-foot retaining walls. Pouring it early also gave the surface time to cure properly.
Broke ground with mass excavation beginning. Over-excavated building pad area to remove unsuitable soils per geotechnical recommendations. Imported structural fill and compacted in lifts.
The ridge site has variable soil conditions. Removing expansive clays and replacing with engineered fill prevents foundation movement down the road.
Added extra 15' of excavation depth to the main house based on soil tests. Better to address soil issues now than deal with settlement later.
Final architectural plans approved by the City of Santa Clara. Building permit issued within 3 weeks—remarkable turnaround for a build of this size. Coordinated with civil engineer on grading plan and utility connections.
This 5-acre hillside lot required careful attention to setbacks, drainage, and fire access. The 3-week permit approval was exceptional for an 11,795 sf custom home.
Early investment in a detailed site survey and preliminary meetings with the city paid off. Complete, well-organized submittals led to the fast approval.
This level of documentation and decision-making rigor is standard on every William & Wall custom home.