Inside the Sanctuary of Light and Earth: A Conversation with Studio Vairä’s, Kait Howell

For over two decades, architect and interior designer Kait Howell has quietly redefined modern minimalist architecture. Known for seamlessly weaving raw, local textures into stark, light-flooded geometries, her latest residential masterpiece—a cascading cliffside home in Big Sur dubbed "The Anchor"—is already being hailed as a milestone in bio-integrated design. We sat down with Howell at her Los Angeles studio to discuss tactile materiality, designing for silence, and why perfection is the enemy of authentic home design.

Chaperone: Kait, your projects often feel less like traditional buildings and more like natural rock formations carved directly into the landscape. How did your early years shape this hyper-grounded approach to living spaces?

Kait Howell: I spent my childhood in a small coastal town in Northern California, raised by a ceramicist mother and an engineer father. My mother taught me to respect the raw, unpredictable nature of clay—how it changes as it dries, how firing it locks in a moment in time. My father, on the other hand, showed me the rigor of structure, tension, and weight. When I began designing architecture, I realized that a home shouldn't fight its environment. It should feel like it was uncovered rather than constructed.

Chaperone: "The Anchor" in Big Sur is currently taking the architectural world by storm. The visual relationship between the monolithic poured concrete and the surrounding redwood canopy is breathtaking. What was the central philosophy behind that design?

Kait Howell: With Big Sur, the landscape is so loud and powerful that anything overly decorative feels disrespectful. The site dictated every decision. We used aggregate in our concrete mixes sourced directly from local riverbed silt, giving the walls a subtle, warm undertone that mirrors the surrounding bluffs. The goal was to create a sanctuary of silence—a place where the transition between indoor living and the Pacific horizon is so fluid that you forget you’re inside a structured shelter.

Chaperone: Minimalist interiors often run the risk of feeling sterile, cold, or museum-like. How do you keep a restrained palette feeling warm and genuinely livable?

Kait Howell: By prioritizing tactile variation over visual clutter. When you reduce the total number of items in a room, the remaining elements carry immense weight. If a space is composed of smooth drywall, sleek polished tile, and flat glass, it will inevitably feel clinical. But if you introduce hand-troweled lime plaster, wire-brushed white oak, oxidized bronze, and unbleached linen, you build rich emotional warmth without adding noise. Sunlight hitting raw plaster creates a micro-shadow depth that paint simply cannot replicate.

Chaperone: Speaking of light, your use of natural illumination is almost liturgical. How do you approach light as a building material?

Kait Howell: Light is our primary building material; the concrete and wood are merely the canvas that catches it. Before drawing a single wall for a client, we track the solar path across the site throughout every season. We design for the morning light in spaces where you wake up and gather, and we capture low afternoon shadows where you unwind. Skylights aren't just holes in a roof to let light in—they are sculpted funnels designed to bounce sunlight down walls, washing them in soft gradients that shift continuously from dawn to dusk.

"Luxury in architecture used to be about sheer square footage and rare marble imported from halfway around the world. Today, true luxury is acoustic comfort, spatial intentionality, and a deep connection to nature."

Chaperone: How has your understanding of "luxury" in residential architecture evolved over the past decade?

Kait Howell: Luxury in architecture used to be about sheer square footage and rare marble imported from halfway around the world. Today, true luxury is acoustic comfort, spatial intentionality, and a deep connection to nature. It’s walking barefoot across a floor with radiant floor heating on a cold morning. It’s closing a heavy pocket door and hearing absolute silence because the acoustic insulation was engineered down to the decibel. People want homes that regulate their nervous systems, not spaces built to flex status to their neighbors.

Chaperone: High-end residential architecture is increasingly confronting climate change and extreme weather. How do you balance elevated aesthetics with environmental resilience?

Kait Howell: Aesthetics and resilience should never be at war. In fact, performance constraints often yield the most innovative beauty. At "The Anchor," we engineered passive solar cooling strategies using deep roof overhangs that shade the interior from harsh summer sun while capturing lower winter rays for natural heating. We also integrated hidden rainwater harvesting systems into the structural columns. Green design isn't an additive feature or an afterthought attached to a blueprint—it must be baked into the foundational massing of the building.

Chaperone: You’re notorious for custom-designing almost all the built-in furniture and lighting fixtures for your residential projects. Why take on that immense load instead of sourcing vintage or designer pieces?

Kait Howell: For me, interior architecture and furniture design are the exact same discipline operating at different scales. A custom low-profile built-in sofa anchored into a stone niche feels like an extension of the room's bones. Sourcing vintage pieces is wonderful—and we certainly layer in curated mid-century design to give a home soul—but custom furniture allows us to control human proportions down to the millimeter. It ensures the home feels entirely cohesive from the foundation wall right down to the dining table.

Chaperone: For readers looking to bring a sense of your signature tranquility into their own existing homes without a full-scale architectural renovation, where should they start?

Kait Howell: Start by editing ruthlessly. Most homes aren't suffering from a lack of beautiful things; they are suffering from spatial congestion. Clear your surfaces and let your rooms breathe. Second, audit your lighting. Swap out harsh overhead lighting for low-level lamps emitting warm, ambient light (2700K or lower) to establish an evening rhythm. Finally, bring in natural materials with patina. Swap synthetic rugs for woven wool or jute, and replace polyester bedding with pure linen. Small tactile shifts completely alter how a body feels inside a space.

Chaperone: Looking ahead, what is the next frontier for Studio Vairä?

Kait Howell: We are currently designing an off-grid retreat in the High Desert of New Mexico, crafted entirely from rammed earth and glass. It's a project that pushes our philosophy of regional material integration further than we’ve ever gone before. The walls literally emerge from the desert floor using the very dirt excavated for the foundation. It’s challenging, slow, and deeply gratifying work—and that is precisely where architecture needs to go.