Every project we take on runs through the same team. The same designer who walked your home during the discovery call is the same one presenting your design concept, managing construction, and standing in your space at final installation. That is not an accident. It is a deliberate choice, and it is one that Inc. magazine just recognized us for.Living with Lolo was named to the Inc. Best Workplaces 2026 list. The recognition is based on employee survey data, not self-nomination. Companies are evaluated on whether people actually trust the environment they work in, whether they understand their role, feel heard, and have real visibility into how decisions get made. Inc. described our recognition as being for cultivating employee trust through explicit expectations, defined decision rights, and direct feedback.That language might sound like HR-speak. But for someone hiring a design-build firm to manage a six-figure renovation of their home, it translates into something concrete.

A Team That Stays

Interior design and construction are relational in a way that most industries are not. The vendor relationships, the institutional knowledge of how a project evolved, the understanding of how a particular client communicates. None of that transfers cleanly when someone leaves mid-project. We have invested in building a team that genuinely wants to be here, and that stability shows up in how your project runs from start to finish.

Everyone Knows Exactly What They Own

Defined decision rights is a phrase that sounds corporate but matters enormously in practice. It means every person on our team has clear ownership of their piece of the project. You are not getting handoffs to someone who does not have context. The person answering your question has the authority and the information to actually answer it.

We Communicate Directly With Our Team and With You

A culture of direct feedback internally creates a firm that is willing to have honest conversations externally. We will tell you when something will not work the way you are imagining it. We will flag when a contractor's timeline is unrealistic. We will push back when a finish that looked great on the sample board will not hold up in your actual space. That same directness is what earned this recognition, and it is what our clients experience in every review meeting.This is our second Inc. recognition this year. We were also named to the Inc. Regionals Southwest 2026 list for fastest-growing private companies across Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas.Two Inc. honors in the same year feels significant. But more than the recognition itself, it reflects the kind of firm we have been quietly building since 2017: one where the people doing the work take real pride in it, and where that pride shows up in every project we deliver.

Of all the custom features I am designing right now, the hot/cold wellness room is the one I am working on the most. I said as much when Bob Vila asked me about the top custom home features of 2026, and I want to give you the full picture here because one paragraph does not do it justice.This is not a trend. It is a shift in how people think about their homes.

What a Wellness Room Actually Is

When most people hear "home wellness room," they picture a treadmill pushed against a wall in a spare bedroom. That is a home gym. What I am designing is something entirely different: a dedicated room built around recovery, not just exercise.A proper hot/cold wellness room typically includes an infrared sauna, a cold plunge, soft lighting on dimmer controls, natural materials like stone and wood, and ventilation designed specifically for the thermal cycling. The best ones feel more like a spa than a gym, and that is intentional.The clients who go all in are also adding red light therapy beds, hyperbaric chambers, and fully custom sauna builds with integrated sound and chromotherapy. These are not afterthoughts. They are the primary reason the room exists.

Why It Is Worth the Square Footage

The question I get most often is whether it justifies the space. My answer is always the same: it depends on whether you will actually use it.What I have observed with clients who have these spaces is that they stop treating wellness as a scheduled item and start treating it as part of how their home functions. It stops being something you have to drive to. The cold plunge is three steps from your bedroom. The sauna is ready in 20 minutes. The barrier disappears, and the routine follows.That shift in daily life is what makes it worth the square footage. A room you use every day earns its place faster than almost any other investment in a home.

What Goes Into Designing One Well

The room itself is straightforward if you plan for it early. The details that matter most:

• Waterproofing and drainage, especially around the cold plunge. This is not optional.
• Ventilation sized for both the sauna heat and the humidity from the cold plunge. Standard bath ventilation is not sufficient.
• Electrical for the sauna heater, which typically requires a dedicated 240V circuit.
• Natural materials that can handle temperature swings: teak, cedar, stone, and concrete all perform well.
• Lighting on dimmers with a warm, low-lux option for post-plunge recovery.
• A transition space, even a small bench area between the sauna and plunge, so the thermal cycling is intentional rather than rushed.

Where projects go wrong is when the wellness room gets treated as a finish-out item rather than a structural one. The plumbing, drainage, and electrical need to be in the plan from the beginning. Retrofitting is expensive and often impractical.

Who Is Asking for This

Across my client base in Scottsdale and the Phoenix metro, requests for dedicated wellness spaces have increased significantly in the past two years. It is not a specific demographic. I am designing these for clients in their 30s and clients in their 60s. Athletes and executives. New builds and renovations.What they share is a willingness to invest in how they feel at home, not just how their home looks. That is the broader shift I am seeing, and the wellness room is where it shows up most clearly right now.

How to Start Planning Yours

If you are in the early stages of a custom build or a major renovation, the best time to plan the wellness room is now. The structural and mechanical requirements are much easier to design in than to add later.If you are working with an existing space, a converted bedroom or a room off the primary suite both work well. The minimum functional size is around 150 square feet, though 200 to 300 gives you room to move and adds a proper transition zone.I would love to talk through what this could look like in your home.

When House Beautiful reached out to include my perspective in a piece on micro-makeovers, I knew it would resonate. It is one of the most common conversations I have with clients, and one of the most misunderstood concepts in residential design.The article, What Is a Micro-Makeover?, explores how targeted, intentional updates to a single room or space can dramatically shift how a home feels, without the timeline or investment of a full renovation. My insights were featured alongside before-and-after images from a recent project, and the piece includes a backlink to Living with Lolo.

What a micro-makeover actually means

A micro-makeover is not a compromise. It is a focused edit. Instead of pulling everything apart and starting over, you identify the one or two decisions in a room that are doing the most damage to how it looks and feels, and you fix those first. For most of my clients in Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, those decisions usually come down to lighting, layering, and scale.The before-and-after work I shared with House Beautiful shows how much a room can shift when you address the right things in the right order. New furniture alone rarely transforms a space. But replace the overhead lighting, add a layer of texture through textiles, and bring in one piece at the right scale, and suddenly the room reads completely differently.

Why this approach matters for busy homeowners

Most of my clients are not looking for a year-long renovation. They want their home to feel like it reflects who they are right now, without uprooting their lives to get there. Micro-makeovers are how we do that. They are scoped tightly, executed quickly, and the results tend to be some of the most satisfying work we do together, because the transformation is immediate.I often tell clients that a home is never finished. You layer it over time, and each phase should feel intentional. A micro-makeover is just one focused layer, done well.

Read the full feature

You can read the full House Beautiful piece here: What Is a Micro-Makeover?. And if you are sitting in a room right now wondering where to even begin, that is exactly the conversation a discovery call is built for.

Every year I see certain design ideas move from conversation to commitment. In 2026, the shift I am watching across luxury homes in Scottsdale and Paradise Valley is less about a single aesthetic and more about how clients want to live. The projects I completed this year, including Oasis Retreat, a 4,408-square-foot second home in North Scottsdale finished in February 2026, reflect six trends that are defining the best interiors I have worked on.These are not trends in the trend-cycle sense. They are decisions that solve real problems for how people actually use a luxury home in the Sonoran Desert.

1. Structural Openings That Change Everything

One of the most transformative changes we made at Oasis Retreat was removing the wall between the entry and lounge. On paper it sounds straightforward. In practice, it turned a divided, dim transition space into a light-filled gathering hub anchored by a custom built-in bar. That single structural move improved circulation, amplified morning light from the east-facing entry, and created a natural focal point for entertaining.In 2026, more clients are walking into design consultations with this kind of confidence. They want to make the structural decision they have been second-guessing for years. The question is no longer whether it is possible. It is who to trust to execute it cleanly.

2. Custom Millwork as the Defining Moment

Built-ins are everywhere. The ones worth doing are designed around how a specific family uses a specific room. At Oasis Retreat, that meant concealing gaming systems inside custom millwork so the space holds together whether the family is hosting a dinner or spending a quiet weekend in. It meant designing the bar as a piece of furniture, not a cabinet with doors.The Scottsdale clients I work with in 2026 are asking for fewer purchased pieces and more things that were made for their home. That requires real trade coordination and a clear design vision that holds across all the moving parts. When it lands, a custom millwork installation reads as something you cannot buy anywhere else. That is exactly what it should feel like.

3. Performance Materials That Do Not Look Like a Compromise

The clients at Oasis Retreat wanted a home that could handle pets and long-term use without sacrificing the look. We did not reach for the standard performance fabric shortlist. Instead, we worked directly with vendors to source finishes and fabrics that held the original aesthetic while standing up to real life. Visitors do not know these materials were chosen for durability. That is exactly the point.This is one of the biggest shifts I am seeing in Scottsdale interior design in 2026. Clients do not want to choose between beautiful and livable. In most cases, they do not have to. The organic modern aesthetic we work in lends itself especially well to performance materials because the textures are natural-looking to begin with. Stone, linen-look fabrics, warm woods. All of them available in durable formats that hold up in a desert climate.

4. Natural Light as the First Layer of Design

At Oasis Retreat, solar orientation shaped every room's purpose before we placed a single piece of furniture. East-facing spaces energize the mornings. South-facing central gathering rooms fill with light through expansive glass doors all afternoon. West-facing rooms frame golden desert sunsets and Pinnacle Peak views. We treated light as the foundation of the design, before furniture, before color, before anything.In Scottsdale, with 300-plus days of sun, this should be non-negotiable. Yet I still see homes where rooms fight their orientation instead of working with it. When a space is designed around its light, it performs better at every hour of the day and photographs the way luxury homes should photograph.

5. Whole-Home Intentionality

What made Oasis Retreat different from many projects I have worked on is that the clients and I agreed from the start: every bedroom would receive the same level of design intention as the living room. No afterthought guest rooms. No primary suites that feel like they ran out of budget at the end.This is a growing expectation from serious luxury clients in 2026. A home where the communal spaces are polished and the private spaces feel forgotten is a missed investment. Bedrooms are where you start and end every day. They shape how you feel in the home as much as any great room does. The best projects I completed this year treated the whole house as a cohesive experience, not a series of showpiece rooms surrounded by filler.

6. Sequencing That Follows the Client's Life

Oasis Retreat is a second home. The owners are based in the Midwest and use it seasonally. That meant the project had to be sequenced around their schedule, not construction convenience. We completed all bedrooms within five weeks so the clients could be in the home during winter season. Everything else built out from there.In 2026, the clients asking the best questions are not asking how fast you can finish. They are asking how to sequence the project so they get to enjoy it while it is being built. That requires a design-build firm with real construction management capability, not just a designer who coordinates contractors after the fact. The difference shows in the result and in the experience of getting there.

What These Trends Share

Every one of these decisions, from the structural wall to the sequencing plan, is about clarity. Scottsdale luxury clients in 2026 are not chasing trends for their own sake. They want homes that are thoughtfully made, highly functional, and deeply personal. They want to make confident decisions and work with a team that can hold the vision all the way through.That is what we built at Oasis Retreat. And it is what we build every time.If you are planning a project in Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, or the broader Phoenix metro, read more about what luxury interior design costs in Scottsdale, or reach out directly to talk through what is possible for your home.