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The Scottsdale architectural firm of Candelaria Design Associates is one of the premier luxury residential architecture firms in the country. Enjoy our blog which features our work, our travel, our recipes, wines, tips on design and decorating, and the lives of our clients and employees, etc.....its all the ingredients for the Candelaria Design Lifestyle. Contact Candelaria Design to start your dream residence 602-604-2001!

Spring 2014 - Possibilities


What a busy start to this year! WOW – I have already traveled to Las Vegas, San Diego, San Francisco, North Carolina, Kansas City, and now New York City and its only April. Off to Denver next weekend to start on a new project, and get a little fly fishing in up in Wyoming and then back to Denver to help my mom and dad move to Phoenix! I am so excited they are moving closer to me. I am looking forward to some of my mom’s amazing cooking and just having more time with them! Then it’s off to Couer d’Alene in a couple weeks to start the design on a new home on Hayden Lake.


All this traveling is totally for fun – fun projects!!! We have eight projects going in California, one now in Idaho after completing four, a couple going in Colorado, several in New Mexico, one in Las Vegas, and a lake house in design in Michigan. Excited about all that’s brewing in Kansas City and Dallas too!  Of course I always work some non-working fun in too on these trips! New York was one of those strictly non-working trips….I took my three daughters, ages 26, 12 and 8 for their first trip to New York. What fun and wow did we cover some ground….as anyone knows who travels with me.  More on that below.

On May 20th I will be the Guest Chef with my good friend Marcellino Verzino at his fantastic restaurant, Marcellino’s in Old Town Scottsdale.  This started with us selling the 16 spots around the exhibition kitchen table for $165 a pop but then decided to auction the 16 spots off and donate the proceeds to the St. Mary’s Food Bank. We have roughly a month to go and we have already raised over $2500. Go to this link and get your spot! www.candelariadesign.com/auction/ We will be filming the evening for one of our Architainment episodes for Season 2. www.thedesignnetwork.com This is going to be a really fun evening so come join us for some fun and great food and wine! By the way – thanks for the over 250,000 views of Architainment’s Season 1 – on to Season 2!


Meanwhile,  besides my mom and dad moving we are moving our offices. We have been in our little Al Beadle courtyard office for 14 years and this summer we will be relocating to the 4th floor of the Am-Trust Tower in Scottsdale just to the west of Nieman Marcus and the Scottsdale Fashion Square. Imagine a Candelaria Design meeting and then go right down the elevator and into the Nieman Marcus shoe department….



In terms of exciting projects we are now underway on the design of the Residence at Mountain Shadows. We are designing a number of models that will range in size from 3800 sf to 5500 sf. The plans will be very open with indoor-outdoor features, roof decks with incredible views of Camelback, three car garages and a transitional style. We will be downsizing our typical Paradise Valley 7500-10000 sf home with all of its bells and whistles into these comfortable gems we will be creating. Get ready for more on this!

Our 2014 Candelaria Design Tour Italy is SOLD OUT and we will be starting to fill spots for our 2015 May trip to Florence, Umbria/Tuscany, and Positano/Capri.  This year will be our 11th tour and we have 20 people traveling with us. Our itinerary this trip includes Florence, Umbria/Tuscany and Lake Como. I am looking forward to this year’s trip and the group we have going! Isabel and I will celebrate our one year anniversary at the Villa d’Este where we got married on the last day of our Tour Italy last year.

Ok now on to New York…. What a great trip we had this last week. I love New York and have now been there several times – the first time being a spur of the moment trip where I was in Virginia for my brother’s wedding in 1990 and I convinced my mom and dad to hop in a rental car after the wedding and we drove up the entire eastern seaboard in one day ending up in Manhattan at dusk whereupon we drove across the Holland Tunnel and parked in the basement of the World Trade Center, took the elevator up to the observation deck and grabbed some pizza.  Got back into the car and then drove across the Brooklyn Bridge and back across Manhattan and then all the way to Philadelphia where we found a hotel.  What a great trip and the only time my folks have been to NYC, and of course the last and only time I was in the World Trade Center. Wow has life and times changed since then.

This trip I took the girls to as many spots as I could in the five days we were there including the new Freedom Tower and the 911 Memorial, the Empire State building, the Today Show, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick’s Cathedral for Easter Mass, a Broadway play – Mamma Mia – Little Italy for dinner, Mario Batali’s Eatly for lunch, Chelsea’s Market, Central Park, Strawberry Fields, 5th Avenue for shopping, a ferry ride around Manhattan, Carnegie Deli, and of course Times Square.
 



I love NYC and the can do attitude this city represents. Nothing stops it – it just goes and goes and goes…..I like that as you can probably tell! Every trip I find new great places to dine and new streets to explore. I enjoyed getting the girls out of their safe little Phoenix bubble and showing them a place like this with people from every corner of the world. I know it really opened their eyes to what a big world it is.

I love travel for that reason – it keeps your eyes open and shows you endless possibilities. I love possibilities….