A belated recap

It’s been a few weeks now since the Modern Phoenix hosted annual Home Tour.  This year the focus was Arcadia which is an area JT and I are interested in (among others) for when we finally buck up and buy a house here in the desert.  My pictures are not that great, there was a ton of people and it made it hard to get a whole room photographed without having at least five randos in it.  Modern Phoenix had a “Gauntlet” challenge and gave out a prize to one lucky dude who visited all the sites (we didn’t make it to all of them – I’m a dawdler and like to really look at everything).  They have his photos on their Facebook site here.

So here’s a quick look at some of my (crummy) photos —  this amazing barrel-vaulted kitchen overlooking a sunken living room is one of the few residential works that architect Paolo Soleri designed.  It was pretty amazing.

Soleri even designed the mailbox.  Like I said, pretty amazing.

This is from a meticulously curated bachelor pad.  His place was an awesome use of 800 sf.

This is the bachelor’s front hang-out area.   Move over kitty, I wouldn’t mind lounging here either.

This next house was owned by the people who own Modern Manor, a furniture store in the Melrose area that you never want to leave.  Their house was pretty much like that too.  I briefly googled around, hoping for a home tour somewhere but to no avail.  This place was too packed on the inside to get any photos but it was to die for (as is the store).

We drove into one of the last stops and I was reminded of St. Louis and the Ridgewood neighborhood where I had dreamed of owning a home one day.

One of the Ridgewood-esque homes had its own MCM play house in the backyard.  There were two houses on the tour on this little U-shape street and it looked like all the homeowners in the whole neighborhood were either architects or designers.  I was ready to move in.  There is definitely real estate stalking in my future.

This great office space was also an architect’s home and it was so peaceful and serene (the pool in the backyard always seems to impart a sense of calm.)

This one’s for you Nick Armadillo – a Nelson clock collector.  Like heavy-duty – they were all over the house.  And based on the neighborhood the house was in, I would hazard a guess that they are all originals.

Because the sun is such a prominent part of everyone’s lives here in Phoenix, solutions for dealing with its burning rays are always welcome.  This house had a great outdoor space with canopies that can be rotated to help cope with the sun at different angles.  Pretty ingenious.

A fun part of the tour was they had classic cars parked at almost every house that matched the vintage of the house.  Plus look at that container garden in the background . . . yum.

I saved the best for last – an Al Beadle house so high up on Camelback Mountain that you would be living amongst all the celebrities and athletes that call the Valley home (or at least their vacation home).

The house is currently gutted and they were showing plans to turn it into a little bit of a monster with large additions out the back but look at this MCM beauty . . .

That is literally the camel’s head of Camelback Mountain in the back left of the photo.  All in all I can’t come up with a better adjective than amazing.  It was so awesome to get to peek into all of these homes – some we could maybe afford one day and others that are clearly the stuff that lottery dreams are made of.  JT ventured a comment that we might have a home worthy of the tour someday.  I hope he’s right.

Cheers – CT