Do you choose to spend your vacation days doing something akin to what you get paid for the rest of the year? Designers Tom Gottelier and Bobby Petersen of Petersen & Gottelier do. They take so much pleasure in the creative process and playing with others that they founded Designers on Holiday, a summer camp in Gotland, Sweden, where the young and handy gather to build inventive outdoor living structures.
Tom and Bobby’s firm is based in LA and Oslo, and wanting to apply their camp concept in California, they teamed up with two LA friends, Ben Rowland of Husler & Rose and Andrew Seiger of General Office, to buy 2.6 acres of untouched desert in Joshua Tree.
The international group all specialize in sustainable design—Tom is an industrial designer; the others are all trained architects and Ben is also a master carpenter. They bought their place, which they dubbed The Sandbox, five years ago “just before the prices got silly,” says Tom—and have been using it for their shared version of fun, partners and three young children now included in the mix. Come see what they’ve created.
Photographs courtesy of The Sandbox.
