If you’ve ever moved living spaces, you understand that the place you call home may be less of the physical building you’re in, and more the things you surround yourself with, the people you invite into it, and the rituals that comprise your days. Living in a big city, this sense of nomadic existence is more prevalent with each new apartment hunt, each new lease signing.

So many times, I’ve packed up all the tchotchkes, clothing, and decorations that exist as physical appendages of my personality into boxes and moved my little transportable life to another building. There are sweet little fleeting moments, though, after the walls are no longer adorned with your belongings, in which the bareness of the space feels huge and full of possibilities despite the conclusiveness of leaving a place for good. In his series Building Harvest, Norberto Melendez poignantly documents the melancholic finality of a home not only emptied of a past life, but also set to be demolished.

Silicon Valley, California, is widely regarded as the epicenter of entrepreneurship and invention in America. The region is home to countless technology start-ups and well-established conglomerates alike. But before anyone knew what a single-chip microprocessor was, the city of San Jose was much like any other beautiful West Coast neighborhood. Reminders of a quaint, pre-internet past are few and far between in the now bustling information hub, but some relics still remain.

The carpets in the pristine 1950s ranch-style home in Silicon Valley are indented from years of long-standing furniture, the wallpaper faded where mirrors and photographs used to hang. Blue painter’s tape tags floor-to-ceiling windows in an “X,” marking what was surely a serene view of the swimming pool in the backyard with an ominous blemish.

Although the house is, by all means, empty, the rich textures and intricate patterns still present in each room serve to paint an idyllic, timeless picture of a past life. There’s an underlying comfort in the warm yellow of the kitchen cupboards, the peaceful sage of the den, and the rosy glow from the bathroom window. Outdated front door intercoms, tasseled drapes, and wood paneling transport the viewer to a time of blissful naivety.

With a background in architecture, photographer and designer Norberto Melendez was drawn to documenting the space as sort of an homage to the often-overlooked simple beauty of our everyday surroundings.

“I just try to elevate those common places so that we take a second look at our surroundings before they change or are gone,” Melendez says of his inspiration. “The place was spacious, with ghosts of what had been. I felt I needed to capture it, to save it, record it for history before it was harvested.”

This routine demolition of an old home is made more personal by the imminent threat of home destruction some Californians are facing today. Wildfires have burned 3.1 million acres of the state so far this year, and many face the tough decision of what, if anything, they can spare from total destruction. Depicting the somber stillness of an emptied out estate, Building Harvest puts into perspective that the most valuable parts of a home are the lives that occupy it.

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