Design Idea: Arizona Style Approach

The red sand dust of the desert; the iconic canyons, mountains, and electrically blue sky: Arizona is an incredibly beautiful space, with some incredibly wonderful design elements in the homes there. This post is about how to give your home a bit of Arizona.

The Arizonan aesthetic is about openness, warmth, and comfort. There is an emphasis on warm or neutral earth tones for the walls, and similarly earthy materials (terra cotta, tiles) for the floors. Furniture is simple, and often wooden. Honestly, if you want a guide to making your home more like Arizona, rent a western for inspiration. A good John Wayne or Clint Eastwood movie will give you a great sense of the color palette and history (real or imagined) of the Great American West.

Modern iterations of Arizona style are fantastic in the way that they blend indoor and outdoor spaces. Often, homeowners will plant small cacti indoors and have large cacti in the garden. This integrates the areas of the home and helps create the sense of continuous indoor and outdoor living. Eco-friendly versions of Arizona gardens focus on having drought-tolerant climate appropriate plants (rather than a water-guzzling lush green lawn, which doesn’t really belong in the middle of a desert). This encourages conservation, and also makes the outdoor spaces more unique and regional. A garden in Arizona should not feel like a garden in Pennsylvania or a garden in Oregon. Each of these places is unique, with unique plant and animal life: the garden that reflects this is somehow much cooler than the garden that doesn’t, don’t you think?

Of course, if you live in a wet and muggy place (hello, East Coast), then planting cacti is probably inappropriate. However, an Arizona approach means that you would do what is uniquely appropriate for your environment. So if you live in a humid area, how about you plant some breezy bamboo and weeping willow trees, or install trellises and have climbing plants on them? Arizona style in the abstract means that your climate and setting will influence the way your home and garden look and are decorated.

To get started on making your home more related to where you live, just do some thinking about it. Ask a local seed seller what native plants you can plant in your garden: look to local furniture manufacturers to find furnishing needs. Wherever you live, you can always apply the Arizona approach to your home.

Image Source: flickr.com/photos/elizabethhudyphotography/404847724

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