By Carly Scholl | Photography by Austin Larue Baker
After renovating 16 different of her own homes across four states, interior designer Julia Buckingham has more experience in home transformations than most people could gain in a lifetime. “I am always on the search for something different,” she explains. “I ask myself, ‘What was missing in the last house?” For her 17th project, the designer decided to depart from the more muted desert tones of her previous residence and go bold with hues. “This home has three times the color,” she notes. “There isn’t even a palette—it just has every single color.”
Located in a historical neighborhood of Scottsdale replete with horse properties, the home was not always as charming as it is today. “People really expected it to be torn down,” she recalls of the midcentury modern structure that had suffered an unfortunate DIY makeover in the 1980s. But the bones were solid and the unique Haveresque attributes of the house—including clerestory windows and a low-slung roofline—were enough to enchant the designer.
After a few structural renovations, including gutting all three bathrooms and opening up the kitchen, Buckingham took her interior design inspiration from a color now prominently featured in nearly every room: pink. “Several years ago, I went on a girls’ trip to Morocco, and we visited a friend in Marrakech who owned a concrete tile company,” she remembers. “I fell in love with a tile that had shades of blush, coral and rose, which I eventually installed as our kitchen backsplash. I just felt like I needed to go pink in this house.”
SOURCES
Interior designer: Julia Buckingham, Julia Buckingham Interiors, Scottsdale, juliabuckinghaminteriors.com.
