In the morning, they enjoy coffee in the Spanish-inspired front courtyard, entered through French doors from their elegant dining room. Outside, they can listen to the fountain and watch roadrunners, finches, cactus wrens, quail and hovering red-tailed hawks. For the remainder of the day, they can golf or visit the community’s mesa-propped Tuscan-style clubhouse with its many amenities. Or, they remain at home in any number of uniquely configured spaces. The home appears, in the most sophisticated manner, as if areas have been added over the years, offering rusticity, instant aging, privacy and a sense of passage from one to another. They often, for instance, retreat to the study, which doubles as a guest bedroom with a sleep sofa, or the adjacent his-and-hers home offices and the library. “We each have our own ‘space’ in our offices, but we meet in the library to chat or watch a little TV,” Peg says.
Frequent meetings, in fact, keyed the success of their home. The Babcocks collaborated with the design/build team to achieve their dream home as well as meet the community’s architectural guidelines. They even first walked the lot with Encore’s Jason Lofgreen to determine optimum siting, so that views of the Superstitions would be achievable from as many rooms as possible. “We had fairly defined ideas of what we wanted from a design viewpoint,” Mel says. They selected, for example, the plumbing and lighting fixtures and the artwork, which they had acquired during their travels, including a Guy Buffet original watercolor in the dining room foyer. “However, coming from the Midwest, we were unfamiliar with some of the finishing details for this home style.”
Fellow Ohioan, Carol Buto, ASID, helped with the overall design as well as many details like tile design, paint finishes, countertop-edge treatments, window treatments, furnishings, fireplace options and fabrics. “They were very hands-on and had definite ideas as to what they wanted, yet allowed me to utilize my design expertise and guide them along the way,” Buto recalls. “The Babcocks were wonderful to work with, and there was a tremendous amount of synergy from everyone,” adds Eric Choules, Landmark’s principal. “Fortunately, that is what makes a project like this so wonderful.”
To achieve their vision for a highly crafted home with well-meshed stylistic influences, the design team specified a rich palette of materials, including rough-sawn timbers, saltillo tiles, noce stone, tumbled travertine, cantera, mortar-washed stone and sand-cast roof tile. To complement these, and the desert and mountain colors, Buto provided a color palette of golds, rusts, browns and neutrals.
