The Cholla Project: An Organic Desert Scottsdale Home | Part One
For Part One, we’re beginning where so much of everyday life happens: the kitchen, butler’s pantry, and dining room.
Welcome to The Cholla Project
The best homes often come together through layers.
Architecture creates the foundation. Furnishings bring comfort and personality. Art, textiles, and collected objects add character. And when those elements thoughtfully complement one another, a house begins to feel like a home.
That approach guided our work on The Cholla Project, an expansive Scottsdale home where our Basil & Tate team had the opportunity to help bring the interiors—and outdoor spaces—to life through furnishings, styling, and the finishing layers that make each room feel complete.
With so much of this beautiful home to share, we're revealing the project in several parts. For Part One, we're beginning in three spaces at the heart of everyday life: the kitchen, butler's pantry, and dining room.
Let’s take a closer look…
Building Upon a Beautiful Foundation
Throughout the Cholla Project, our goal was to work with the home's existing architectural palette rather than compete with it.
Warm wood tones, natural stone, light finishes, and thoughtfully crafted architectural details already established a beautiful sense of character throughout the home. From there, we looked for opportunities to introduce furnishings, textiles, artwork, accessories, and styling that would complement those elements while creating warmth and connection from one space to the next.
The result feels collected rather than overly coordinated—elevated, but still comfortable enough for everyday living.
And nowhere is that balance more apparent than in the kitchen.
The Heart of the Home: A Warm, Inviting Kitchen
With its warm wood cabinetry, light countertops, generous island, and incredible stonework surrounding the range, the Cholla Project kitchen gave us a beautiful starting point.
Rather than introducing elements that would compete for attention, we focused on pieces that would allow the architecture to remain the star.
Counter stools bring warmth and softness to the expansive island while creating an inviting place to gather. Sculptural lighting adds visual interest overhead, and natural textures and thoughtfully placed accessories give the room the lived-in quality that makes a large kitchen feel approachable.
Of course, it's nearly impossible to enter this room without noticing the range.
The Star of the Show
The custom stone hood and range create a striking focal point within the kitchen.
Surrounded by softly textured tile and complemented by warm metal accents, the feature brings scale, craftsmanship, and architectural character to the room.
For us, the opportunity was to consider how everything around such a strong focal point could support it.
Instead of filling the kitchen with competing statements, the furnishings and finishing touches remain warm and understated, allowing the beautiful materiality of the space to shine.
It's a good example of something we believe strongly at Basil & Tate: not every element in a room needs to demand attention.
Sometimes, thoughtful design is about knowing what should take center stage—and allowing everything else to quietly bring the room together.
A Butler’s Pantry That’s Anything But an Afterthought
Just beyond the kitchen is one of our favorite spaces in the home: an incredibly spacious butler's pantry.
With generous cabinetry, countertops, open shelving, additional appliances, and dedicated zones for everyday necessities, the room already had plenty of hardworking function.
Our finishing touches focused on making all of that function feel warm, organized, and connected to the rest of the home.
Natural woven baskets add texture while keeping everyday items neatly tucked away. Glass canisters, cookbooks, artwork, wood accents, and collected kitchen pieces transform the open shelving into something that's equally useful and beautiful.
Rather than hiding every practical item, we embraced the opportunity to make everyday necessities part of the visual story.
The checkerboard stone flooring brings another layer of character to the room, giving this utilitarian space its own distinct personality while still feeling at home alongside the kitchen.
It's proof that even the hardest-working spaces deserve a little design love.
A Dining Room Designed for Gathering
Moving into the dining room, the furnishings take on an even larger role in defining the experience of the space.
We anchored the room with a substantial dark wood dining table, introducing a deeper tone that creates beautiful contrast against the home's lighter architectural palette.
Warm upholstered dining chairs soften the room and invite guests to linger, while a generous area rug grounds the arrangement and helps create a more intimate gathering space within the home's open footprint.
Overhead, sculptural brass lighting draws the eye upward and adds another layer of warmth.
But some of our favorite details are found along the walls.
Picture ledges provided the perfect opportunity to create a collected display of artwork and objects in varying scales, giving the room personality without making it feel overly formal or precious.
The finished space feels special enough for celebrations and dinner parties, but relaxed enough for the meals and conversations that happen every day.
Because ultimately, that's what we want a dining room to do: invite people to gather and stay awhile.
The Art of Layering a Home
The Cholla Project is also a beautiful example of why furnishings and styling aren't simply the final step of a project.
They're what give a home its personality.
A thoughtfully chosen chair can change how a room is used. The right rug can bring scale and softness to an expansive space. Artwork can introduce history and character. Accessories can make a new home feel collected rather than newly decorated.
And when you're furnishing an entire home, those decisions become even more important.
Each individual room needs its own identity while still feeling connected to the spaces around it.
Throughout Cholla, we used recurring tones, natural textures, warm woods, sculptural forms, and collected details to create that sense of continuity—allowing the home's architecture and furnishings to work together as one cohesive story.
More of The Cholla Project Is Coming Soon
…and this is only Part One.
The Cholla Project extends far beyond these first three spaces, with thoughtfully furnished interiors and outdoor living areas still to explore.
We'll be sharing more chapters of this Scottsdale home reveal soon, taking you through the spaces, furnishings, styling details, and design decisions that helped bring the complete home together.
If you're moving into a new home, completing a renovation or custom build, or simply looking around and realizing your spaces still don't feel finished, our team would love to help.
Basil & Tate's Furnishings & Interior Styling service takes the guesswork out of creating a cohesive home—from space planning and furniture selections to procurement, delivery, installation, and those final styling details that make everything feel complete.
Ready to bring your home together?
Basil & Tate helps homeowners create thoughtful, elevated spaces designed around the way they actually live. Schedule your complimentary 15-minute discovery call to tell us a little about your project and learn more about working together.
Ready to elevate your home?
From Denver home renovations to creating custom new-build homes, the design team here at Basil & Tate is ready to help you bring goodness home. If you’re looking for an expert design eye to help with furnishing, remodeling or building from the ground up, let’s schedule a chat and see if our design team is the right fit for your home project.
Welcome to Basil & Tate— a full-service residential interior design studio serving Denver, Colorado & beyond, curating bespoke interiors that seamlessly blend comfort, nature and timeless design. We describe our design aesthetic as earthy, organic, and elevated. If you like a combination of classic and modern design, mixed with soft neutral colors and natural textures, you’re in the right place.
Whether you’re looking for an interior designer to save you time on your custom home renovation or to help bring your luxury new-build vision to life, the interior design experts at Basil & Tate will be with you every step of the way to deliver a turn-key, white-glove design experience.
Looking for interior design services within the Denver, Colorado or Scottsdale, Arizona area? Let's get in touch.
READ MORE FROM THE B&T DESIGN BLOG
