The listing for the properties — four five-acre parcels of desert scrub near Pioneertown, Calif. — landed in Dave McAdam’s inbox one morning before dawn. By 10 a.m., he was in contract to buy all the lots, sight unseen, for $320,000. One of the parcels had been planted with a cabin, a low-slung, concrete-block one-bedroom structure clad in swirly patterned pink stone. At 1,000 square feet, it was just right, Mr. McAdam said, for a single man.

Mr. McAdam, now 69, had a long career as a journalist, editing a portfolio of 23 community newspapers in Orange County, and then as a public relations executive, handling crisis management for various industries, before he bought his first desert property in Yucca Valley in 2003.

After he sobered up, as he put it, he researched the best ways to build there without wrecking the xeriscape of native plants and boulders — leave the land alone, take out the junk — and developed, with others, a system for making prefabricated light-gauge steel-frame houses. He built a lovely steel-and-glass prototype on that property in 2009 and continued to investigate the folkways and particularities of his habitat, for what would be his new career as a developer of modernist houses with a small footprint.