We’ve all had an experience like this: You walk into a high-ceilinged living room with light pouring in through the windows, and you feel instantly energized. Inspired, even. Or you step through the door of a cozy bedroom with soft lighting, a plush rug, and layered textiles, and your shoulders relax—in fact, your whole system seems to slow down. That’s emotional design in action: the idea that the design of the homes (and offices) where we spend our time can have a powerful effect on our moods and even our behavior.
For Chicago-based architect and interior designer Anne Lukan, it’s second nature to create interiors that not only look beautiful, but also evoke the emotions their inhabitants want to experience. “What I do is very personal,” she says. “I come into somebody’s home and affect their daily life, their everyday, from the small moments to the bigger, long-lasting memories.”
Here’s how Lukan approached the redesign of a Pueblo-style home in Scottsdale, Arizona, so it accommodates and enhances its owners’ every mood and attitude.
“You can feel the way it grounds you.”
It’s now a well-accepted concept (one supported by a slew of scientific studies) that views of surrounding landscapes and an abundance of natural light enhance well-being—they can lower your blood pressure, reduce anxiety, and engender feelings of calm. “Early conversations with my clients stemmed around this feeling of ease that they wanted to create for themselves,” Lukan recalls. So she took every opportunity to showcase the desert and mountain vistas surrounding the Scottsdale home.
The key, naturally, was to incorporate as many windows as possible—and Lukan had a specific aesthetic in mind: luxurious scale but a modern, minimalist design that would let the landscape speak for itself. Direct glaze windows from the Marvin Modern collection, with their thin metal frames, expansive sizes, and clean lines, provide elegance “without the focus being taken away from the space and the view beyond,” she says. “Finding ways to capture the light, to give it a feeling of easiness, airiness, was something that we took a lot of care with.” In the bedrooms (including a bunk room designed for future grandkids), a casita-style lounge space, and the kitchen, casement windows, also from the Marvin Modern collection, coordinate with the sleek look of the direct-glaze versions but open and close with a rotating handle to let in the desert breezes.
To reflect the colors on view outside, Lukan layered the interior spaces of the home with furniture and fabrics in natural tones and integrated plenty of wood. “You can feel the way it grounds you. We were very intentional about selecting colors that had staying power,” she says. “That’s something that we were careful about in every single room: Is this grounding? Does it feel natural? Are we incorporating something that is durable, inherent, and authentic to the location, to this space?”
“There’s a lifting moment.”
The home’s organic Pueblo style is characterized by rounded walls, fluid curves, and varying floor and ceiling heights. Lukan played with scale and designed an organic, undulating layout to achieve a feeling of wonder and inspiration as you travel from the door of the home toward its central rooms, with new details and visual delights appearing around every bend. “The carving of those spaces, the soft arches—when you come into the home, there is a feeling that gives you this moment of reprieve. There’s a lifting moment. As soon as you walk in, the space opens for you. And as you walk through each slight angle, the home is revealing itself to you.”
“Very protected, very intimate.”
Though the house is spacious and the landscape it sits amid is sweeping, Lukan made sure there were opportunities for the homeowners to retreat to a place of quiet and contemplation. “One of the beautiful, underrated moments of the home is that right off of the front entry, there’s this private, almost secret garden of a breakfast patio,” she says.
The patio is accessed through a curved window wall, inset with a glass-paneled Ultimate Narrow Style Swinging Door by Marvin. And though the area fronts the house—usually a very public space—it is sunken and partially enclosed by exterior walls and landscaping, affording a sense of seclusion. “You have this perfect opportunity for a personal coffee-for-two out front,” Lukan says. “It feels very private, very protected, very intimate.”
It’s yet another example of why the spaces in a home should look beautiful, function efficiently, and reflect the everyday lives of the inhabitants, Lukan says. “But it’s also about creating a supportive layer for their most beautiful, special memories of life.”
