American Psycho producers on designing the Invisible House, where Space Odyssey meets Donald Judd

During the 1970s and 1980s, Chris and Roberta Hanley were enmeshed in New York’s buzzing downtown art scene. ‘We were hanging out with Warhol and jamming with Basquiat when he was doing the SAMO street art,’ says Chris, then a music business entrepreneur who founded Intergalactic Music, Inc., the first commercial electronic music studio in the US — Afrika Bambaataa, The Ramones and Blondie were just some of the artists to record there.

Always interested in art and photography, Chris also began dealing Pop and Minimalist works before Roberta brought him into the film industry, where they’d produce The Virgin Suicides (1999) and American Psycho (2000), among other movies with cult followings.

While the couple currently splits their time between California, England and Kenya, it was during their New York heyday that they’d establish lifelong friendships with fellow creatives, including model, actress and producer, ‘Baby’ Jane Holzer, one of Warhol’s first ‘Superstars’. Chris shares that they’d often buy art together to experience and exchange, and that Holzer had invested in his film, Spring Breakers (2012). Eventually their mutual investments expanded into real estate.

In 2006 Chris and Roberta came across an 80-acre lot in Joshua Tree, one of California’s thriving National Parks. ‘It was like going to a sculpture garden where these beautiful natural rock formations were the sculptures,’ describes Chris, who found that Holzer was equally captivated by the desert property and its potential. ‘And so, we bought it like a piece of art.’

Since expanded to 90 acres, this land now situates the Invisible House, a monolithic, 5,500-square-foot smart residence cantilevered 100 feet off the ground. Due to its mirrored exterior, which seemingly disappears into the rural, awe-inspiring landscape, the home has been admired by billions via the Internet and social media — global luxury brands like, BMW and Hermès, as well as celebrities, including Alicia Keys, Demi Lovato, and Diplo, are just some of the names who’ve visited or had projects there.

Completed in 2019, the Invisible House and its unparalleled surrounding land, which also includes a prefabricated guest house, are being sold by Christie’s International Real Estate for $18 million. Designed in partnership with Tomas Osinski, who runs his eponymous architectural practice and is Frank Gehry’s long-time collaborator, the one-of-a-kind home was the brainchild of Chris, who in addition to being a film producer, designs buildings, furnishings, and sculpture.

Having grown up in New Jersey and working from an early age in New York City, Chris was influenced by skyscrapers’ reflective surfaces and grand proportions. ‘I was always at MoMA and other museums, so monolithic, mirrored shapes just felt comfortable to me,’ says Chris, adding that Minimalists like Donald Judd have long been an inspiration. During the late 1970s, Chris began renovating lofts, consistently opting for ‘high ceilings and big open spaces with few walls.’

Having since worked on 15 buildings (and counting), Chris’s first structure built from scratch came in 1997 when he designed a hilltop village called Honeymoon House on Lamu, an island on the Kenyan coast. With this angular, castle-like residence, Chris honed his signature style in which he conceives ‘architecture like experiential sculpture’.

When it came to the Invisible House, the Hanleys’ primary goal was to keep the architecture simplified to appreciate and live amidst the impressive natural setting. Initially, they drove a 720-square-foot prefabricated house built by Jennifer Siegal (founder and principal of Los Angeles-based firm Office of Mobile Design) to the desert. However, because it was less than 20-feet wide, county requirements necessitated the construction of a larger home on the land.

‘I started drawing a 100-foot rectangle, which ended up being 225 feet. Originally the pool was outside on a platform, and the rectangle cantilevered over the rocks, but then I decided a pure monolith would be much cooler,’ describes Chris of designing the three-bedroom, four-bathroom Invisible House in 2010.

Construction began about three years later. Taking cues from the enigmatic black menhir in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which has also long intrigued him, Chris sought a minimalist form that juxtaposed with the landscape, which Roberta likens to a painting by French Surrealist Yves Tanguy: ‘These beautiful bubbling rock formations makes it feel like you’re on another planet.’

The house itself also conjures art, notes Chris: ‘The way the light gets filtered, the house appears like a black monument in the morning. Towards the afternoon, it brightens up, so the background and the foreground look the same, and it becomes invisible. At night, the interior makes the home glow like a work by Dan Flavin, James Turrell, or Phillip K. Smith III.’ Chris additionally designed a programmable indoor light installation, where the colour can be changed every 16 feet.

Indoors, Roberta intentionally kept furnishings minimal but of the utmost quality, sticking with grey tones in which furnishings disappeared with the floor, to keep the focus on what lies beyond the windows. The primary bedroom even has a two-ton solid-glass bed by Milanese design company Santambrogio.

The predominant interior statement, however, comes from the 100-foot, HTP-solar-heated, freshwater swimming pool, complete with programmable LED lights and music, which spans the main living space. In addition to being a coveted amenity for exercise and relaxation, the pool ensures ideal moisture levels to keep skin hydrated in the desert. As environmental activists, the Hanleys also worked diligently to make the Invisible House as eco-friendly as possible — it’s currently about 90% off-grid.

Steps away from the entrance to the National Park and the larger Joshua Tree community, the Invisible House is both accessible, yet secluded, primed for running, bicycling, and horseback riding within its own acreage. Adding to the bountiful wildlife, four-legged neighbours, from rabbits to bighorn sheep, often peruse the property. Especially during the pandemic, Joshua Tree became a popular haven for Los Angelites and other city dwellers to clear their minds. ‘Whether you’re a corporate head or an artist, when you’re at the Invisible House, you may think of something you have never thought of before,’ says Roberta. ‘It’s a very special and powerful setting.’

As for the decision to list the Invisible House on the market, ‘It’s like when you create a movie — you can’t live in your own art,’ says Chris. The jack-of-all-trades has dreamt up several new projects, including the Starburst House, a collaboration with UK architect James Whitaker. On the other side of the mountain range in Joshua Tree, the home is composed of 21 cargo-container-like prisms in a sputnik shape.

‘In order for Chris to continue developing as an artist, it’s necessary to detach and do another project that is world class and important,’ says Roberta, who imagines the Invisible House would be the ideal residence for someone with equally ‘revolutionary’ ambitions, whether in tech, science, healthcare or art. ‘We want to experiment and see if a new building can have that same lightning-rod quality.’