Before Photos: Saguaro Inn

The past few months have been an amazing whirlwind between releasing our new book ‘At Home in Joshua Tree‘, and closing on our dream property in Tucson, Arizona. If you know us well, you’ve likely heard us talking about our dream of opening up an inn next to a national park one day. Rich obsessively scrolls through real estate sites each morning, and by chance one day he happened upon a commercial real estate listing that from the initial photo just appeared as a plot of land for sale. Though it only had six unclear photos, we both perked up. It was difficult to tell what this property was, but from the little bit we could see we had a feeling it was special.

Fast forward to a few months later, we have now closed on this property in the Sonoran desert that hugs the western side of Saguaro National park. The property had been abandoned for the past ten years, and we feel as though it had been sitting waiting for us to find it and bring it back to life. We are completely stunned by the beauty of this place, and through the design process our goal is simply to enhance what’s already here. There’s so much to see on this property and it’s impossible for us to show you everything, but the before photos below and the video tour we have saved as a highlight on our account should give you an idea. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us!

The entrance

Let’s start with the entrance to the inn. Here we are smiling our butts off right after closing on the property (thanks for capturing this moment Tim Melideo). The soap yuccas on the right remind us of Joshua trees, and have us feeling quite at home. 

Once passing through this entrance, a winding garden path surrounded by incredible desert plants leads to the main doorway.

The entrance already has incredible bones and is made with salvaged railroad ties, I mean come on. Our plans for this area include a more welcoming front door, a fresh coat of paint for the exterior of the building, and possibly an outdoor entry table with more small cacti and plants.

Shared Spaces in the Inn

Once inside, you’ll find a large sunken living room which will be a shared space. We keep dreaming of people from all over enjoying this space together with late night conversations and music playing. Sunlight is an incredibly important part of design for us as well, so we’ve already gotten started opening this space up by trimming that wall with the shelving unit down to half the height to create a welcoming entrance and a sunny living room.

Attached to the shared living room is a shared kitchen, which is already one of the sunniest and most welcoming spaces. Of course it clearly needs some work (it’s missing cabinetry, some walls, and some flooring), but we know there will be so many simple mornings and beautiful dinner gatherings in here.

Here’s a closer look at the dining room. Our plans for this room are to sheetrock the walls and plaster them to match the existing walls, create an arched pantry with increased height from the current one there, and tile the floor with Fireclay tile. We already have a beautiful hand painted half moon tile picked out.

Some of the spaces that need the most work at the inn are the bathrooms. While they do have some cool tile left behind, they could use a major update to both simplify, brighten, and bring them into the present. We’d like to leave some of the existing tile in this shared bathroom, while replacing the counters to allow for more contrast in here.

Bedrooms

The inn will have seven rentable spaces for overnight stays – above is one of those rooms. We already love so much about this room, it just needs that window replaced, a fresh coat of paint, and cozy decor. Below are a few more rooms we’ll be designing.

Outdoor Spaces

For more of the rooms, check out our full tour on Instagram. Heading back outside, this fire pit is one of our absolute favorite areas:

As with most parts of the property, the fire pit is in need of repair… but the BONES! The fire pit sits just to the side of the pool, so we have dreams of adding a deck out to the side of it for poolside lounging. Speaking of the pool, check out this beauty.

It was a photo similar to the one below that initially caught our attention on the property listing, though at the time we had no idea it was an empty pool – we thought it was a canyon! Filling this pool up and taking a swim is going to be on our minds all throughout our renovations, that’s for sure.

There’s so many details to this place that there’s no way we can capture it all in a single blog post—in fact I’m sure we’ll still be discovering things about this place years from now.

We have an overwhelming amount of work on our plates for this year, but we’re breaking it down into small decisions and reminding ourselves to enjoy the process along the way. We’ll be spending a lot of evenings walking through the Saguaros dreaming up design decisions and experiences for the future of this inn.

We’ll be sharing the process with you through our blog and Instagram account, so let us know along the way if there’s any specific details you’d like to see!