GreatGarages: Shelby Museum

Highline Autos, April 2012

The Shelby American Collection in Boulder, Colorado, showcases the heritage of Shelby American. Founded in 1997 by Steve Volk and fellow Cobra enthusiasts, brothers Bill and Dave Murray, the nonprofit museum offers guests approximately 25 classic Shelby racers as well as other marques with unique histories: small-block 289 Cobras; the potent 427s; and the Pete Brock-designed champion Daytona Coupe. In addition, the museum collection includes the Ford GT40, Shelby GT350; GT350R and the 428-powered Shelby GT500; the Cobra forerunner, the AC Bristol; and a 1958 Ferrari Testa Rossa. High-powered rides inside: Have Vrooom for a minute?

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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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Alice Cooper: Motown to Cooper’sTown

Highline Autos, January 2012

Alice Cooper likes good tight shocks as well as Shock Rock, a classic Mustang as much as a vintage guitar. The Phoenix-area resident, and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, has been a car fan since growing up in Detroit, where his dad sold cars and shared his automotive love with his son, who would combine music and business talents to create the legendary stage persona celebrated worldwide. Today, Alice combines these passions with his enduring love for wife Sheryl — 40 years of marriage — his children, church and community and golfing. Slip on your dancing shoes, grab your car keys, and let’s rock!

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The Siren Song of Isola Li Galli

Private Islands, Winter 2011-12

The sirenic call of Isola Li Galli is supreme personal reconstruction — not the rocky destruction offered Jason and Ulysses, returning from ancient Troy. An archipelago of five islands, just off Italy’s Amalfi Coast and southwest of Positano, Isola Li Galli was believed to be the home of the Sirens, mythological women whose haunting music enticed sailors to their deaths on the cliffs. Beauty, serenity and wonder are the life-affirming calls today: Rudolf Nureyev heard them as have Andrea Bocelli and other very-deep-pocketed guests. Be allured and sail in to this ultimate vacation getaway.

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Bob Parsons: Life Runs in Cycles

Highline Autos, October 2011

GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons loves his custom cycles –– all celebrating in some way his service in the U.S. Marine Corps. He even once kept a camouflaged two-wheeler in the corridor just outside his Scottsdale, Arizona, office, sans gasoline and oil. Just a work of art, a nod to esprit de corps, he says. But all of them are beautiful, and powerful: Hang out riding with Bob for a few minutes, and hang on!

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Bob Bondurant: No Brakes at 78

Highline Autos, July 2011

Legendary racer, Paradise Valley, Ariz., resident Bob Bondurant has trained Navy SEALS, NASCAR legends, teen drivers and everyday moms at his world-famous driving school just south of Phoenix at Wildhorse Pass. He’s also collected powerful classic cars during a lifetime of race-driving and teaching. If you see him turning hot laps at the school, you’ll find that this high-octane octogenarian still handles the hair-pins. Third gear: It’s all right, but hang on tight! Bob celebrates 83 this year and will enter the National Corvette Hall of Fame in September, adding still another podium win to his superb career.

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Jayriding

Highline Autos, May 2011

Seven years ago, comedian Jay Leno invited us into his mega-garage/museum in Burbank, not too far from the NBC studio where he once taped “The Tonight Show.” Everyone knows he’s very serious about his cars but, at the same time, he’s also just a kid enjoying his Matchbox miniatures every day, now in retirement: steamers, tire-screeching muscle cars, a Duesy or two, exotic European racers, electrics, turbos to turbines. Jump up on his century-old farm tractor for Mardi Gras, Hollywood style: The multi-ton steam behemoth turns on car alarms and turns fans out into the streets in pursuit of cell phone images, book signings,and autographs. Gee Whiz and Wow: Heeere’s Jay!

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Haunted Arizona

Gateway Magazine, September-October 2010

There’s really not just one season, and many reasons, to visit these boutique Arizona hotels, some ghosted. In Greer, the Molly Butler Lodge attracted Teddy Roosevelt, so it shouldn’t be rough riding for you. In Jerome, the Jerome Grand Hotel was built to serve the once copper-boom town, and in Prescott, the Hotel Vendome billeted silent movie star, Tom Mix. North in Williams is the Red Garter Inn, erected to attract the bordello/saloon trade more than a century ago, when what is now the Grand Canyon Railway debuted. And, at the South Rim, the El Tovar grandly celebrates its century plus, just yards from the superlative natural wonder.

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Durango: Land for All Reasons

Arizona Foothills, May-June 2008

“At the Glacier Club community north of Durango, Colo., we sit on the second-floor porch of our cliffside cabin. Above us, midsummer stars ignite, and the lights of luxury residences peek from 7,800-foot-high ridgelines. Tomorrow morning, a half-mile or so down in the valley below, we will hear the whistle – and see the steam plumes – of the day’s first train as it climbs to Silverton, the once booming mining town. . . . ” And that’s just the first stop of this trip: Tickets, please.

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Phoenix: Up From the Desert

Modernism Magazine, Fall 2007

The seeds of contemporary Phoenix-area architecture were post-Civil War adobe and newfangled wood houses. Today, many styles are represented throughout the country’s fifth most populous city: Territorial, Spanish Mission, International, Mid-Modern. The influence of Frank Lloyd Wright is pervasive: Taliesin West, ASU Gammage, the Arizona Biltmore (he consulted) and many homes. But, the work of Al Beadle in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s is celebrated here as are others’ designs of that time and today: Ralph Haver, Kemper and Michael Goodwin, Ned Sawyer, Bennie Gonzales, Will Bruder, Wright apprentice Vern Swaback and Paolo Soleri. The tour bus leaves inside.

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Arizona’s Scenic Byways

Highroads, September-October 2007

“Paths cut by the area’s Earliest Native American inhabitants and their pioneer successors; a trail of the conquistadors seeking golden cities in the north; scenic roads that celebrate eons of uplift and erosion in canyons, spires, turrets, buttes, monoliths and mesas — in Arizona, the journey is the destination. Getting there is at least as significant as where you’re going, and the downside of driving is that you have to keep your eyes on the road and not on the glorious roadside.” Here are seven world-class paths to hours of Arizona enjoyment.

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Shutter to Think: Pedro Guerrero

Desert Living, May-June 2007

Image matters, even for icons: For the last 20 years of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life, Pedro (‘Pete’) Guerrero was the great architect’s personal photographer. The long-time resident of Florence, a small town south of Phoenix, Guerrero took not only some of the last pictures of Wright and his work but also some of the best. Make a quick f-stop and get some new perspectives on America’s greatest architect. And focus a moment on Pete, too, a delightful man, now passed.

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Curves of Steel

Highline Autos, May 2007

Auburns, Delages and Delahayes, Oh my! At a Phoenix Art Museum exhibition many years back, we delighted in these and other gorgeous, voluptuous autos and vans, including a Hispano-Suiza and a McLaren. Here the beauty of flowing lines and svelteness meets the beast of power and steel. The union is class and passion. These mobile beauties will drive you to an aesthetic experience. Buckle up!

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Janet Brooks Design

Spectacular Homes of the Southwest, 2006 (Panache Partners)

Janet Brooks, ASID, came down to Phoenix from Durango, Colo., in 1987 and has established her design firm as one of the finest in the Southwest. Her award-winning residential and commercial work combines clean lines with elegance, always calling on natural Southwest illumination for texture, color and subtlety. We’re proud to have written many local and national stories celebrating Janet’s inspired projects and their meticulous attention to detail.

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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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Wright or Wrong?

Arizona Foothills, October 2004

In the 1950s, Frank Lloyd Wright designed what would have been the most spectacular state capitol building in the country — set amidst the landmark Papago Buttes in Phoenix. As with so many of the architect’s before-their-time designs, that building was never built. More than a half century later, a savvy Phoenix-based developer placed one of the many spires intended for that project as an intersection focal point for his shopping complex in Scottsdale. Wright or Wrong? Inspiring, or not?

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