Contemporary Retirement

Arizona Foothills, November 2012

Susan Hersker, ASID, is one of the Scottsdale-area’s finest interior designers. With associate Elaine Ryckman, Allied ASID, she recently completed this dual-master home in a north Scottsdale golf community for the retirement-focused owners. Featuring a large open living area with automated pocketing doors to outdoor areas for mingling and entertaining, the home combines complementary textures: stacked-stone walls, honed-stone floors, polished-stone countertops, metals such as patinaed steel and copper, art glass, exotic woods and opulent fabrics such as silk, mohair and calfskin. These, combined with the warm wood colors and neutral-colored floor, dramatically backdrop the furniture, which blends shades of beige, taupe, eggplant, expresso and ivory.

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Modern Craftsman Works at DC Ranch

Arizona Foothills, September 2012

La Casa Builders, Scottsdale, (Ron Steege and Tim Larson, principals) designed and built this diamond-shape-themed home and casita for a DC Ranch family of five requesting contemporary style rooted in nature and tradition. Avoiding overembellishment, self-indulgence and clutter, “Dobrados Diamantes” is inspired by the hand-crafting and natural-materials principles of the 19th/early-20th-century Arts and Crafts movement, whose exemplars include William Morris, Rennie Mackintosh, Gustav Stickley, Louis Tiffany,Frank Lloyd Wright and brothers Charles Sumner and Henry Greene. Elizabeth Rosensteel, Phoenix, completed the interior design.

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The Way it Was at DC Ranch

Scottsdale Living, Summer 2012

This young family, with three boys, uses all 13,128 square feet of their Southwest-Mediterranean-style DC Ranch in north Scottsdale. Incorporating the spirit of the parents’ Midwest backgrounds, the golf-course-lot home by Scottsdale-based La Casa Builders includes five bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a five-car garage and a detached casita, all of which the couple generously opens for friends and family. “We wanted the amenities of a master-planned community and the fabric of a traditional community,” one owner says. “We wanted a home where the children can ride their bikes down the street and go to school with the same children they play football with.”

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A Boulder Approach

Arizona Foothills, January 2012

A masterful conjunction of art and architecture, this 9,000-sq.-ft. contemporary home backs to a boulder desert preserve hill in Paradise Valley. Designed by Jon Bernhard, AIA, one of the Swaback Partners, the distinguished Scottsdale architecture firm, the home is on six-plus acres vegetated with native flora to celebrate the lush diversity of the native desert. Inside, Bernhard called for luxe details such as crotch mahogany tables with black granite bases; split-face and Mesa Stone CMU columns; Jara wood flooring with black granite inlay and flamed Oklahoma Pink granite flooring. Take your shoes off, and tip your hats, entering this outstanding home.

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Sterling Ridge

Phoenix Home & Garden, April 2005

A Sterling performance at Desert Mountain in north Scottsdale: David and Eileen Hovey’s 11,500-square-foot home in the Sterling Ridge village of the 8,000-acre golf course community embraces the desert and celebrates the sun and transparency. Fusing 21st-century designs and contemporary materials and artworks, their three-level, five-bedroom home affirms Hovey’s position as an innovative desert architect, continually rechallenged by the terrain of the High Sonoran. A Chicago native, Hovey, FAIA, is the architect/developer of two of the finest Valley condominium communities: the Optima Biltmore Towers in Phoenix and the spectacular Optima Camelview Village in downtown Scottsdale. This is the way to build a luxury desert home.

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