2009 DIY design awards
Tucson Home applauds this year’s contest winners
See photos from this year’s event
It’s where you bring the bacon and where charity begins. It’s where you hang your hat and where the heart is—and there’s no place like it.
However you think of “home,” for the winners of our 4th annual DIY Design Awards, home is the ultimate blank slate, sparking equal parts inspiration and perspiration as careful planning and creativity converge.
The Judges
Diana Patterson
Diana Patterson, of Patterson House Design Group, currently serves as president of ASID Arizona South. Specializing in residential redesign and remodel, Patterson also explores design as a columnist and contributing writer for local publications.
Dara Davis
Dara Davis has been an Allied Member of ASID for 35 years. She owns Sunset Interiors in Tucson and Tubac Ranch in Tubac, both specializing in what she’s coined “Tucson regional design,” which integrates Native American, Mexican, ranch, and traditional Western influences.
Sarah Burton
Sarah Burton, editor of Tucson Home, has worked on the DIY Design Awards since its debut in 2006. A graduate of the Sonoran Institute’s Community Design Academy, Burton just wrapped up a kitchen remodel, inspired by our winners’ “go get ’em” attitudes.
Diane Kashy
Diane Kashy, art director of Tucson Home, has also worked on the magazine’s DIY contest since 2006. Over the years, she’s been impressed not only by the winners’ creativity and range, but also by their ability to get great results on any budget.
The Sponsors
Special thanks to the sponsors of our 4th Annual DIY Design Awards
Grand prize donated by Sunset Interiors & Design Studio. Other generous sponsors include Studio C, House’n Garden Furniture Inc., Whole Foods Market, Zócalo
Grand Prize Winner
Storybook Sanctuary
Laura Hayes’ design is a study in Fs: functional, family friendly, and fun
As a little girl, Laura Hayes loved Alice in Wonderland more than any other book. Today, her Civano home (and its many looking glasses) reflects that love of whimsy, humor, and imagination. Moravian stars hang overhead. Brilliant silver spheres of all sizes cluster in corners and above cabinets. And throughout the house, cool blues, greens, and purples—the backdrop to recurring Moroccan and Arabian motifs—evoke the magical feel of a fairytale castle.But unlike in any real castle, nothing in Laura’s house is precious. It is, above all else, a living space for the family, Laura’s husband Mehmet Efe, and their kids Zekeriya and Zahra. Thus, a floor-to-ceiling metal planter meant for garden supplies finds its home in the kitchen, where, supremely functional, it holds mail, pens and pencils, and kitchen gadgets. Furniture on casters moves easily around in destructible concrete floors, allowing the kids to slide an otherwise unwieldy coffee table to create a playspace or use it as a makeshift stepladder.
That practical approach leads Laura to find beautiful new uses for everyday objects. Daunted by the price of glass tile, she created a backsplash with the magical look of gems set in stone by grouting glass baubles meant for vases or aquariums. Panels of metal trellis meant for vines cleverly support a drape of canopy over the bed.Therein lies another secret to Laura’s design—accessible materials. “The products I use are affordable and readily available,” she says. “Anyone can do this. I’m not a carpenter, I don’t know how to build. But I do know how to use hand tools, paint, and a sewing machine.”
And while some of Laura’s design projects might make the average homeowner nervous, for Laura, fearlessness yields above—average results. “I’m not scared of my house,” she says. “Anything that can be done can be undone. I’m not looking at retail value down the road. I want my home to reflect me, not other people. I’m not going to let it control what I do.”
In the end, that attitude has given Laura exactly what she wanted in a home: a peaceful, tranquil sanctuary. “You know, it’s a crazy world out there,” she says. “I just want to come in here and feel good. And I do.”
Winner
Outside In
For Bill and Sue Sackrider, nature provides the perfect palette
It would be interesting to know just how many Arizona residents have come to the state by way of golf. Such is the case for Bill and Sue Sackrider, who lived in Minnesota when they visited Phoenix to attend golf school. Before long, they were snowbirds and now live in Tucson year—round in a Kevin Howard—designed, custom home tucked into the foothills of the Tortolita Mountains, built by Tom Mancuso Construction. The split—level home follows the lay of the land, rising here, dipping there, flowing with the desert that thrives just beyond massive windows, becoming as much a part of the interior design as the landscape around it.
“Maybe I’m claustrophobic,” Sue jokes, “but I like big windows. If you love your surroundings, bring them inside. I don’t want to close everything out—I want to see it.” Sue’s design choices reflect that same philosophy, bringing the desert in through a soft, neutral palette and natural materials: white and beige, bird’s eye maple, gray granite countertops with sweeping swatches of black, and fireplaces set with stones in place of logs.
Plant motifs throughout the home reinforce the effect—as branches in vases, as patterns in fabrics. Even the light fixtures suggest flora in their metal, echoes of the spikier plants of the Sonoran Desert just outside the windows. All of these details—down to the last inch of paint—stem from Sue’s inherent talent for design. What she didn’t pick out, she made, putting considerable sewing skills to work. And all of it combines in what the couple calls a “soft contemporary” aesthetic that is at the same time soothing and invigorating.
“When I first walk in, I like to feel energy,” Sue explains, “a lively energy but still a kind of warm and cozy feeling.” To maintain that energy, Sue changes some elements from time to time, updating her design with the seasons to maintain harmony between the interior of the home and the life around it with polish and panache. For her, it comes naturally. “People ask me, ’How do you do it?’ But for me, it’s easy. I just do what I like.”
Winner
Family Matters
Latin America inspires Danny and Rachael Pendleton Casto’s family-first oasis
Rachael Pendleton Casto and her husband Danny can count on one hand the things in their lives that matter most: each other plus their two sets of twins, Lance and Nikos, and Lily and Jordan. For the Castos, family-first values drive every aspect of their lives, not least the design of their home.
The couple met at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and fell in love with Tucson when Danny, a family practice doctor, came to Tucson to do his residency. They bought their current home in 2000. Rachael, an emergency room nurse, became an at-home mom. That transition sparked the beginning of a home renovation project still going strong.
‘I started realizing, I’m going to be home. I want to see life. I want to hear birds. I want to hear runningwater. And it became very important to me to see beauty around me,’ Rachael recalls. So while many pregnant women might balk at the idea of taking on home improvement, Rachael, a former competitive cyclist, tapped into seemingly superhuman energy reserves.
She started simply—ripping out three layers of linoleum in the kitchen to expose its beautiful originalwood and replacing laminate countertops with mesquite. From there, she moved on to painting, planting, and ultimately designing patio additions to the couple’s historic Sam Hughes home. Today, the Casto home, while big enough for a family of six, has the coziness of a guest-house casita. Bright colors, rough-hewn wood, coarsely mortared brick, punched tin, and ceramic tile—elements inspired by traveling through Latin America—dominate the design.
And while the inside is beautiful, fountains and trees, a tree house, and a tire swing make the outdoors irresistible. Porches flank all four sides of the home, offering shade at any time of day and stargazing at night. Best of all, stations for imaginative play dot the home and yard, fostering in the Castos’ kids the same kind of creativity fueling Rachael’s going-on-nine-years of DIY design.
Winner
Model of Success
Practicing on a small scale, Scott and Jackie Yale get it right the first time
When Scott and Jackie Yale, both transplants from New England, moved into their 2,500-square foot westside home in 1997, they had modest plans for changes. “We thought we were just going to put on a master bathroom,” Scott explains. “We started that, and the next thing we knew, we were raising the roof.” The couple went on to add roughly 1,000 square feet to their home, a four-year chunk of work for which every detail—and here’s the kicker—came out exactly as planned. It bears telling that Jackie has a master‘s in cellular and molecular biology. Scott’s an anesthesiologist. So it’s not a stretch to say that neither is lacking in left-brain. No doubt, analytical thinking contributed to home projects marked by a level of precision rare in the world of DIY. But the real secret to their success? Models. Scott made the first when he needed a permit to build a patio. Not knowing what the building inspector wanted, he created a to-scale model from foam board and balsa wood. “I thought he was crazy when he first did it,” Jackie recalls. “But when we got into the house project, we’d be looking at plans, and I wasn’t able to visualize what the room would really look like. Then it hit me—I’ll do what he did.” From then on, Jackie made 3-D miniatures for each successive room of their remodel. And we’re not talking just four walls and a floor. The models included furniture, appliances, cabinet doors—a level of detail that allowed them to see exactly how much space they’d have when a chair was pulled out or a refrigerator door opened. Scott took stewardship for functionality to balance Jackie’s natural bent for design. If the couple arrived at a change in plans, Jackie would build another model, the one-to-three-day delay well worth the payoff of getting things right “before we had too much demolition going on,” Scott says. The end result was “spooky”— Jackie’s word for how closely the couple’s finished work matched their models. “I’ll never forget when the first room was done. I was standing in there, holding the model, and the room looked just like it.” For Gayle and Barry Davis, it‘s not so much the home as what it holds
Gayle Davis sums it up in eight words: “You will never be bored in this house.” Partly, it’s the colors. Rich terra-cotta gives way to chartreuse, purple, pink, yellows, and deep blues. Warm. Colorful. Fun. And well suited for the couple’s home in the Catalina foothills. Gayle actually took a bougainvillea cutting to the paint store to have them mix color for the dining room walls. “I’ve always loved color,” Gayle explains. “When we lived in Chicago, the style then was that everything was white or beige or greige. When we came to this home, I decided: It’s the desert, it’s relaxed— I’m gonna go all out. It’s only paint, and if it’s really awful, it’s only paint.” But color is only the backdrop to what Gayle and her husband Barry really love in their home—their stuff. Both love to travel, shop, and collect, both have eclectic taste, and only one rule governs what gets displayed: it has to be something that truly reflects them and what they love. Barry explains it by way of anecdote, recounting a recent dinner at a friend’s home. “They took out some coasters that their grand- children had given them. They made as much of a fuss over that as they did over a piece of Western art that was very smart. And that really impressed me.” So it is at the Davis’, where tchotchke figurines on the mantle are as much the charm of the home as an original Manet etching, or a mounted rifle originally owned by Barr ’s distant relative Harriet Beecher Stowe, a home where Gayle has hung a Lawrence Lee and Peter Lik in one room and stenciled playful trails of ants in the next. “When we have friends or family over, I want it to be an all experience,” Gayle says. “Not just ‘Wow, the food was great.’ I want them to go away feeling happy. I’m sure that some people walk into this house for the first time and think, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ This is not everyone’s taste. And I’m glad. Because it makes it unique.”
Winner
The Right Stuff
